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.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

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...

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed...

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once...

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period...

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...

One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.

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...

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to...

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

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.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.

People who don’t expect justice don’t have to suffer disappointment.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

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...

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...

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; nochange. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what istheirs.

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

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything possible (…) The tribe, sir....

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...

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, “I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will...

Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among...

Fortran”. [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that...

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...

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don’t see.

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

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Mr Baley”, said Quemot, “you can’t treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain”.”I’m not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can...

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