To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more...

Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

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...

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...

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

Past glories are poor feeding.

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

Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but...

I tell you it’s deadly when you start thinking your wife might be right.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Society is much more easily soothed than one’s own conscience.

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...

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and...

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

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

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...

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 — has become crucial to our salvation, if...

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.

For a wise man, I have been told, once said, ‘Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.’ But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty...

…We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the...

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does...

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

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...

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

Bible: Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behaviour which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years,...

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...

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 [Asimov]’ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people’s books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a...

I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.

Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech – and both are still dangerous to this day – but human beings would not be...

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...

How 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,...

Well, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been...

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

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

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

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

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...

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