Isaac Asimov Quotes

Emotions, my dear Seldon, are a powerful engine of human action, far more powerful than human beings themselves realize, and you cannot know how much can be done with the merest touch and how reluctant I am to do it.

The Jews continued to be suspicious of foreigners. So did most other people of the time. So do most people today. We ourselves are often suspicious of people who look different, who talk differently, who aren't just like ourselves.
But it is not too late to learn the lesson of Ruth. ... should we not look at each person closely, as an individual with his own virtues and faults, and judge him for that and not for anything else.
And if we could find all the Ruths of the world, how much better off all of us would be.

Solo il mio sistema emotivo è stato condizionato, il cervello è come prima. Sono portato a pensare in una determinata direzione, non costretto. E ci sono alcune cose che posso vedere molto più chiaramente, perché mi sono liberato dei vincoli emotivi.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

You are easy to explain – even to you. You may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your Universe-existence – down to the smallest detail. Therefore you have your capacity for thought, your memories, your personality. It still seems to you that you are you.

Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.

The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.

You know the Outlanders. Also, you're a trader and one of the best. You've been to Korell and you know the Korellians. That's where you've got to go." Mallow breathed deeply. "As a spy?

Education isn't something you can finish.

Science fiction is important because it fights the natural notion that there's something permanent about things the way they are right now.

Of course, the reader might argue that I was as stubborn in my viewpoint as they were in theirs. Yes, indeed, but I was right and they were wrong and that made the difference.

You're keeping dry. The raindrops are missing you." "Yes, indeed," said Trevize. "I am avoiding wetness." "But doesn't it feel good to be wet now and then?" "Absolutely. But at my choice, not the rain's.

Does said, “You’re not a…a believer?”
“I’m a scholar,” said Mycelium with obvious pride.

It is my belief that throughout the history of the positronic robot, the First Law of Robotics has been deliberately misquoted.

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