Isaac Asimov
I want to be a human being, nothing more and nothing less. ... I don't suppose we can ever stop hating each other, but why encourage that by keeping the old labels with their ready-made history of millennial hate?Collection: Hate
Life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew.Collection: Life
Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.Collection: Time
The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.Collection: Age
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.Collection: Want
Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.Collection: Conscience
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.Collection: Goodbye
All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.Collection: Choices
I do not use airplanes. They strike me as unsporting. You can have an automobile accident-and survive. You can be on a sinking ship-and survive. You can be in an earthquake, fire, volcanic eruption, tornado, what you will-and survive. But if your plane crashes, you do not survive. And I say the heck with it.Collection: Funny
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.Collection: Children
We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth-if such a thing can even be said to exist.Collection: Writing
Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.Collection: Rain
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.Collection: Real
An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.Collection: Atoms
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.Collection: Distance
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.Collection: Men
A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.Collection: Fire
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.Collection: Writing
Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Knowledge
Custom is second nature. Be accustomed to a bald head, sufficiently accustomed, and hair on it would seem monstrous.Collection: Hair
The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers.Collection: Art
Tens of millions of Americans who neither know or understand the actual arguments for, or even against, evolution, march in the Army of the Night with their Bibles held highCollection: Army
The vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic.Collection: Believe
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.Collection: Fiction
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 worthwhileCollection: Machines
Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.Collection: Enemy
As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived.Collection: Artist
At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.Collection: Two
What do you call that nice, shiny white metal they use to make sidings and airplanes out of? Aluminum, right? Aluminum, pronounced 'uh-LOO-mih-num', right? Anybody knows that! But do you know how the British spell it? 'Aluminium', pronounced 'Al-yoo-MIH-nee-um'. Ever hear anything so ridiculous? The French and Germans spell it 'aluminium', too, but they're foreigners who don't speak Earth-standard. You'd think the British, however, using our language, would be more carefulCollection: Nice
The Iranians are Moslems and the Iraqi are Moslems. Both are certain that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet and believe it with all their hearts. And yet, at the moment, Iraq doesn't trust Iran worth a damn, and Iran trusts Iraq even less than that. In fact, Iran is convinced that Iraq is in the pay of the Great Satan (that's God-fearing America, in case you've forgotten) and Iraq counters with the accusation that it is Iran who is in the pay of the Great Satan. Neither side is accusing the Godless Soviets of anything, which is a puzzleCollection: Believe
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.Collection: War
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.” -R. Daneel OlivawCollection: Mean
So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."Collection: Writing
If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.Collection: Speak
True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."Collection: Education
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.Collection: People
If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make?Collection: Differences
Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.Collection: Book
We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.Collection: Forever
Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Growing Up
Until now in world's history, whenever we've had a dark age, its been temporary and local. And other parts of the world have been doing fine. And eventually, they help you get out of the dark age. We are now facing a possible dark age which is going to be world-wide and permanent! That's not fun. That's a different thing. But once we have established many worlds, we can do whatever we want as long as we do it one world at a time.Collection: Fun
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.Collection: Work
Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.Collection: Light
The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.Collection: Writing
Intelligence is a valuable thing, but it is not usually the key to survival. Sheer fecundity ... usually counts. The intelligent gorilla doesn't do as well as the less intelligent but more-fecund rat, which doesn't do as well as the still-less-intelligent but still-more-fecund cockroach, which doesn't do as well as the minimally-intelligent but maximally-fecund bacterium.Collection: Intelligent
Only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.Collection: Lying