Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “The spell of power never quite releases its hold.”

— Isaac Asimov

352. “Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict – its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself – what’s the expression – ah, yes, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper,’ as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.”

— Isaac Asimov

353. “John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.”

— Isaac Asimov

354. “One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.”

— Isaac Asimov

355. “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

356. “The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.”

— Isaac Asimov

357. “What broke loose is popularly and succinctly described as hell.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

359. “Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand.”

— Isaac Asimov

360. “God, how that stings! I’ve spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that’s just science fiction.”

— Isaac Asimov

361. “When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I’m writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.”

— Isaac Asimov

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362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

367. “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

368. “It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!”

— Isaac Asimov

369. “In fact, it was part of the Tyrannian military tradition that a little discomfort on the part of the soldier was good for discipline.”

— Isaac Asimov

370. “An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

372. “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

373. “One way of saving on energy use would be to do away with unnecessary transportation. For instance, people commute between work and home, or travel long distances to engage in business conferences. With the development of improved communications and increasing automation, it will become possible in the not-too-distant future, for people to control and maintain business operations and machinery at a distance.”

— Isaac Asimov

374. “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

375. “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

376. “There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.”

— Isaac Asimov

377. “The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.”

— Isaac Asimov

378. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

380. “But what could I want with riches? The true wealth is the love of one’s people.”

— Isaac Asimov

381. “When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion – the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.”

— Isaac Asimov

382. “Now tell me what happened – in words. I want your translation of the mathematics.”

— Isaac Asimov

383. “The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.”

— Isaac Asimov

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384. “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

385. “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

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386. “Consider the question suitably modified.”

— Isaac Asimov

387. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

390. “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

391. “Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn’t get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn’t be any native inhabitants. You couldn’t expect life – which is fundamentally dependent on light – to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

Featured in: Book Quotes

396. “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

397. “They were scientists enough to admit that they were wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov

398. “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

399. “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

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