Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?”

— Isaac Asimov

352. “Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.”

— Isaac Asimov

353. “Well, there is one – a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man whom they call the Mule.” “The Mule?” She considered. “Ever hear of him, Torie?”

— Isaac Asimov

354. “Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.”

— Isaac Asimov

355. “I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.”

— Isaac Asimov

356. “And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool production of 12,000 years of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate in mathematics freshly obtained and an invitation from the great Hari Seldon to come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat mysterious Seldon Project. What.”

— Isaac Asimov

357. “Only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.”

— Isaac Asimov

358. “The word “robot” is from a Czech word meaning “compulsory labor.”

— Isaac Asimov

359. “People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.”

— Isaac Asimov

360. “People say ‘It’s as plain as the noise on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone hold a mirror up to you?”

— Isaac Asimov

361. “All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.”

— Isaac Asimov

362. “I have never written a book that didn’t teach me far more than it taught my reader.”

— Isaac Asimov

363. “To Mankind And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won after all.”

— Isaac Asimov

364. “A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.”

— Isaac Asimov

365. “Supongo que no hay manera de hacer regresar la nube con forma de hongo a esa bonita y reluciente esfera de uranio.”

— Isaac Asimov

366. “It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.”

— Isaac Asimov

367. “The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It’s the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect – but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.”

— Isaac Asimov

368. “After all, all devices have their dangers. The discovery of speech introduced communication – and lies. The discovery of fire introduced cooking – and arson. The discovery of the compass improved navigation – and destroyed civilizations in Mexico and Peru. The automobile is marvelously useful – and kills Americans by the tens of thousands each year. Medical advances have saved lives by the millions – and intensified the population explosion.”

— Isaac Asimov

369. “So far, scientists have not uncovered any evidence that would hint that the workings of the Universe require the action of a divine being. On the other hand, scientists have uncovered no evidence that indicates that a divine being does not exist.”

— Isaac Asimov

370. “Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That’s how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.”

— Isaac Asimov

371. “Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.”

— Isaac Asimov

372. “A happy wall is a long-lived wall, a practical wall, a useful wall.”

— Isaac Asimov

373. “Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions – not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?”

— Isaac Asimov

374. “It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom.”

— Isaac Asimov

375. “Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless – or even actually harmful.”

— Isaac Asimov

376. “Consider the question suitably modified.”

— Isaac Asimov

377. “I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.”

— Isaac Asimov

378. “A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.”

— Isaac Asimov

379. “They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.”

— Isaac Asimov

380. “One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.”

— Isaac Asimov

381. “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required.”

— Isaac Asimov

382. “It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?”

— Isaac Asimov

383. “They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we’re on our way.”

— Isaac Asimov

384. “There are many people, many worlds who believe in supernaturalism in one form or another... religion, if you like the word better. We may disagree with them in one way or another, but we are as likely to be wrong in our disbelief as they in their belief. In any case, there is no disgrace in such belief and my questions were not intended as insults.”

— Isaac Asimov

385. “It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas.”

— Isaac Asimov

386. “To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing.”

— Isaac Asimov

387. “He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.”

— Isaac Asimov

388. “A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being’s ultimate good after all.”

— Isaac Asimov

389. “Author’s Notes: This story starts with section 6. This is not a mistake. I have my own subtle reasoning. So, just read, and enjoy.”

— Isaac Asimov

390. “There’s probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn’t stay bribed; not for any sum.”

— Isaac Asimov

391. “It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration – a stagnation!”

— Isaac Asimov

392. “The world is being Americanized and technologized to its limits, and that makes it dull for some people. Reaching the Moon restores the frontier and gives us the lands beyond.”

— Isaac Asimov

393. “It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests. Can you understand that? Can you understand that in averting the pitfalls and miseries that beset man, Eternity prevents men from finding their own bitter and better solutions, the real solutions that come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it?”

— Isaac Asimov

394. “The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. Hari.”

— Isaac Asimov

395. “If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.”

— Isaac Asimov

396. “If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.”

— Isaac Asimov

397. “He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured – and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.”

— Isaac Asimov

398. “If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. They make the children come up here once a year, after they’re five. I don’t know if it does any good. They don’t get enough of it, really, and the first few times they scream themselves into hysteria. They ought to start as soon as they’re weaned and have the trip once a week.”

— Isaac Asimov

399. “There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain.”

— Isaac Asimov

400. “But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.′ ‘It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand – at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war.”

— Isaac Asimov