Isaac Asimov

“Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.”            -I did nothing for you.”            -You loved me and your love made me--human.”

“É muito fácil tratar com sarcasmo uma causa nobre. Basta querer.”

“Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]”

“If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.”

“I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.”

“They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.”

“There is no Master but the Master,” he said, “and QT-1 is his prophet.”

“The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.”

“These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.”

“It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.”

“I am not impressed by ancestry, since if I could trace my origins to Judas Maccabeus or to King David, that would not add one inch to my stature, either physically, mentally or ethically. What's more, what about all my other ancestors? There must have been uncounted thousands of human beings in the century of King David, all of whom in some small way contributed to my production, and every one of them but King David might have been criminals and drunkards for all I know. (Nor was King David himself entirely unremarkable for his ethical standards.)”

“Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.”

“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

“I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”

“To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.”

“Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.”

“What would you consider a good job?" Answered as follows:"A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money."When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made.”

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”

“Weak emperors mean strong viceroys. ”

“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.”

“It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold. ”

“The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect--but, nearly invariably, the stupidest. ”

“Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters.”

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

“A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics.”

“Señor Norman Muller, debo informarle, en nombre del presidente de los Estados Unidos, de que le han escogido para representar al electorado norteamericano el martes 4 de noviembre de 2008.”

“Supongo que no hay manera de hacer regresar la nube con forma de hongo a esa bonita y reluciente esfera de uranio.”

“Ralph Nimmo carecía de título universitario y se enorgullecía de ello. -Un título [...] es el primer paso de un recorrido calamitoso. Como no quieres desperdiciarlo, pasas al trabajo de graduado y a la investigación doctoral. Terminas por ser un absoluto ignorante de todo, excepto en tu estrechísima especialidad.”

“You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.”

“Every man's position on Earth is restricted to the distance he can walk.'-- "The Last Trump”

“One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.”

“It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus.”

“Ardo dal desiderio di spiegare, e la mia massima soddisfazione è prendere qualcosa di ragionevolmente intricato e renderlo chiaro passo dopo passo. È il modo più facile per chiarire le cose a me stesso.”

“Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.”

“There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.”

“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”

“Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict—its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself—what's the expression—ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.”

“It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.”

“All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.”

“It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”

“Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.”

“Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time.""Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.”

“I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right.”

“I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification...It's these respectable people here who create those hooligans out there.”

“Saying something is 'too bad' is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your business and not be interested anymore. It's a lot worse than 'too bad.' It's against everything decent and natural.”

“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.”

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.”

“Naturally, there's got to be a limit for I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.”

“My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad jobthat he isn't worth discussing.”