Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

406. “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

407. “In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses.”

— Isaac Asimov

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

411. “You can’t maintain discipline that way.” Mallow said icily, “I can. There’s no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I’ll have it in the face of death, or it’s useless.”

— Isaac Asimov

412. “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

413. “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

414. “No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.”

— Isaac Asimov

415. “To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.”

— Isaac Asimov

416. “And his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours.”

— Isaac Asimov

417. “I’m being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime.”

— Isaac Asimov

418. “The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control.”

— Isaac Asimov

419. “Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.”

— Isaac Asimov

420. “It’s really disheartening, the universal stupidity. I think that I wouldn’t grieve at mankind’s suicide through sheer evilness of heart, or through mere recklessness. There’s something so damned undignified at going to destruction through sheer thickheaded stupidity. What’s the use of being men if that’s how you have to die.”

— Isaac Asimov

421. “We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

423. “There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.”

— Isaac Asimov

424. “If, from a distance of seven thousand parsecs, the fall of Kalgan to the armies of the Mule had produced reverberations that had excited the curiosity of an old Trader, the apprehension of a dogged captain, and the annoyance of a meticulous mayor – to those on Kalgan itself, it produced nothing and excited no one. It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.”

— Isaac Asimov

425. “It amounts to a diseased attitude – a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority.”

— Isaac Asimov

426. “Life is a successive symphony of losses.”

— Isaac Asimov

427. “Galaxy, he hated them! He stopped himself, drew a firm breath... There was no use thinking hate... He had learned to bear in silence. He ought not forget what he had learned now. Of all times, not now.”

— Isaac Asimov

428. “From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the vagrant stars at the Galaxy’s rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation influence.”

— Isaac Asimov

429. “Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation – there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.”

— Isaac Asimov

430. “It’s always easy to explain the unknown by postulating a superhuman and arbitrary will.”

— Isaac Asimov

431. “There are always individuals who pit their minds against the general modes of thought and who are arrogant enough to feel that they alone are right and that the many are wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov

432. “There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn’t another behind it; no statement that hasn’t three meanings.”

— Isaac Asimov

433. “To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.”

— Isaac Asimov

434. “I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.”

— Isaac Asimov

435. “A strong offensive is indicated. The stalemate you seem to be satisfied with is fatal. It would be a confession of weakness to all the worlds of the Periphery, where the appearance of strength is all-important, and there’s not one vulture among.”

— Isaac Asimov

436. “The mistiness of distance hides the truth.”

— Isaac Asimov

437. “There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.”

— Isaac Asimov

438. “I’ve seen many people with status, but I’m still looking for a happy one. Status won’t sit still under you; you have to continually fight to keep from sinking.”

— Isaac Asimov

439. “Force yourself to laugh and you’ll soon find something to laugh about. A being causes his own feelings. Splurge on it!”

— Isaac Asimov

440. “That is, he made boasts. But boasts are wind and deeds are hard.”

— Isaac Asimov

441. “Perhaps! Your opinions are yours, of course. Still you are rather young.” Dryly. “It is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life. You became mayor of the city when you were two years younger than I am now.”

— Isaac Asimov

442. “He didn’t believe that, surely.” “Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being insulted would only lead to humiliation. And since he didn’t want that, the simplest path to follow was to believe what I said.”

— Isaac Asimov

443. “Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you.”

— Isaac Asimov

444. “Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made.”

— Isaac Asimov

445. “We were never under any delusions as to which was more important, an individual or humanity.”

— Isaac Asimov

446. “Work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes undying part of a totality. That totality is human life. Past and present and to come forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens and thousands of years. And has been growing more elaborate, and on the whole more beautiful.”

— Isaac Asimov

447. “It is as much my job to prevent harm to mankind as a whole as yours is to prevent harm to man as an individual.”

— Isaac Asimov

448. “He who is needed must learn to endure flattery.”

— Isaac Asimov

449. “Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

— Isaac Asimov

450. “There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatable with the greater, the lesser must give way.”

— Isaac Asimov