Isaac Asimov

“A "simple aspect of science" may be defined as one which, through good fortune, I happen to understand.”

“Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true”

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.”

“Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.”

“A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.”

“It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.”

“Do you know what it is to play a part? To split your personality deliberately for twenty-four hours a day? Even when with friends? Even when alone, so that you will never forget inadvertently? To be a dilettante? To be eternally amused? To be of no account? To be so effete and faintly ridiculous that you have convinced all who know you of your own worthlessness? All so that your life may be safe even though it means it has become barely worth living. But even so, once in a while I can fight them.”

“You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.”

“And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story)”

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

“Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true.”

“I tell you it's deadly when you start thinking your wife might be right.”

“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”

“It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.”

“There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Methyl alcohol, they called "wood spirit"; ethyl alcohol, "wine spirit." Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as "spirits." (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word "alcohol" was taken, call ethyl alcohol "spirit" from the English. This is a queer exchange.)”

“even the purest and most high-minded scientist finds it expedient sometimes to assault the fortress of truth with the blunt weapon of trail and error. sometimes it works beautifully.”

“We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.''For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of you. I don't. I want more good ones.”

“The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.”

“people live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.”

“Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”

“In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.”

“It wasn’t to be endured! For half an hour, the Captain shot off salvo after salvo of the very worst sort of profanity. He started with the sun and ran down the list of planets, satellites, asteroids, comets, to the very meteors themselves. He was starting on the nearer fixed stars, when he collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. He was so excited that he never thought to ask us what we were doing in the storeroom in the first place, and for that Whitefield and I were duly grateful.But Captain Bartlett is no fool. Having purged his system of its nervous tension, he saw clearly that that which cannot be cured must be endured.”

“Childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child”

“To MankindAnd the hope that the war against follymay someday be won after all.”

“A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

“Нельзя же сказать человеку: «Ты можешь творить. Так давай, твори». Гораздо вернее подождать, пока он сам не скажет: «Я могу творить, и я буду творить, хотите вы этого или нет».”

“I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere.”

“People think of education as something they can finish.”

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

“I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide?”

“A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don't usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting. I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?" The recording angel said, "It is." I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be a mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist." "No mistake," said the recording angel. "But as an atheist how can I qualify?" The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you." "I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?" The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this.”

“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”

“Does everyone just believe what he wants to?""As long as possible. Sometimes longer.""What about you?""You mean, am I human? Certainly. I don't believe I'm really old. I believe I'm quite attractive. I believe you seek out my company because you think I'm charming - even when you insist on turning the conversation to physics.”

“On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again...on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward.”

“It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines.”

“With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window. Through it shone the stars! Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.”

“In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”

“A circle has no end.”

“Bu yaygın budalalık insanın cesaretini kırıyor. Galiba insanlığın sırf kötü kalpli ve pervasız olduğu için intihar etmesine üzülmeyeceğim. Kalın kafalılık ve ahmaklık yüzünden ölmek pek vakarsızca bir şey. Madem böyle öleceksin o zaman insan olmanın ne yararı var?”

“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

“Evet. Bu çok garip ama gerçekten özlemiyorum. Mavi göğü, yeşil kırları, akan suları özleyeceğimden emindim. Arza özgü bütün bu nitelikleri. Ama hiç birini de özlemiyorum. Onları rüyamda bile görmüyorum."Selene, "Bazen öyle şeyler oluyor" dedi. "Daha doğrusu vatan özlemi çekmediklerini söyleyen bazı Göççülerle karşılaştım. Tabii öyleleri az. Ve hiç kimse bu küçük grubun müşterek özelliklerini anlayamıyor. Tabii türlü tahminler yürütülüyor. Kimisi bu Göççülerde ciddi bir duygusuzluk olduğunu, onların hiçbir şey hissedemediklerini söylüyor. Kimisi ise fazla duygulu olduklarını ve sinir krizi geçirmekten korktukları için vatan hasreti duyduklarını itiraftan kaçındıklarını.”

“Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.”

“The Imperial forces must keep their hands off, but they find that they can do much even so. Each sector is encouraged to be suspicious of its neighbors. Within each sector, economic and social classes are encouraged to wage a kind of war with each other. The result is that all over Trantor it is impossible for the people to take united action. Everywhere, the people would rather fight each other than make a common stand against the central tyranny and the Empire rules without having to exert force.”

“There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously weaken their loyalty to the rulers.”

“Lamentarsi è una caratteristica innata della specie umana. Nel Secolo del Carbone la gente imprecava contro la macchina a vapore; in una commedia di Shakespeare un personaggio lamenta l'invenzione della polvere da sparo. Mille anni dopo ci si lamentava per la fabbricazione del cervello positronico.”

“The robot said, 'I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of thi sevil into what you call good.' He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own owrds, he said, 'Go, and sin no more!”

“Galaxy! When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet?”

“and he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it.”