American author & professor of biochemistry (1920-1992)
There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Empire
All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Second Foundation
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Robot Visions
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"My Own View", The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
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
Foundation and Empire
You wait for the war to happen like vultures. If you want to help, prevent the war. Don't save the remnants. Save them all.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Gentle Vultures", Super-Science Fiction, Dec. 1957
Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Pebble in the Sky
A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation's Edge
If you ask for too much, you lose even that which you have.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation's Edge
Why ... 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
Prelude to Foundation
It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Pebble in the Sky
It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Planet that Wasn't
To be perfectly honest with you, I don't really see what the big deal is about getting to the Moon with the computers and the mid-course-corrections. I know you are a bunch of engineers, and you know better than I do, but I ask you ... once you get there beyond the atmosphere, do you or do you not see the Moon?
ISAAC ASIMOV
lecture at Newark College of Engineering, Nov. 8, 1974
Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? -- in ancient astronauts? -- in the Bermuda triangle? -- in life after death? "No," I reply. "No, no, no, no, and again no." One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Roving Mind
The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Gods Themselves
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.
ISAAC ASIMOV
I, Robot
When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
ISAAC ASIMOV
I, Asimov: A Memoir