Top 500 Isaac Asimov Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

411. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Isaac Asimov

413. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

422. “We speak of time and mind, which do not easily yield to categories. We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam of both. We separate good and evil and find that mind is an amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

424. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Isaac Asimov

445. “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

446. “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

447. “Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, “I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn’t that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?”

— Isaac Asimov

448. “Pions are the mediating particles of the strong nuclear interaction. The intensity of the interaction depends on the mass of the pions and that mass can, under certain specialized conditions, be altered. The Lunar physicists have developed an instrument they call the Pionizer, which can be made to do jut such a thing. Once the pion’s mass is decreased, or increased for that matter, it is, effectively, part of another Universe; it becomes a gateway, a crossing point.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Isaac Asimov

450. “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