Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

403. “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

404. “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

405. “The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end. With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they would have crushed us. It is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

417. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

424. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

427. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

429. “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

430. “And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism.”

— Isaac Asimov

431. “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

432. “The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting.”

— Isaac Asimov

433. “For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

436. “Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one.”

— Isaac Asimov

437. “You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

442. “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

443. “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

444. “It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. He was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.”

— Isaac Asimov

445. “Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.”

— Isaac Asimov

446. “A human being born at one of Uranus’s poles would be a middle-aged man at sunset and a very old man before it was time for a second sunrise.”

— Isaac Asimov

447. “The Scientist – with capital letters and no smile.”

— Isaac Asimov

448. “Even as though dearest with th en humble and defenseless, thus shalt though be dealt with.”

— Isaac Asimov

449. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov