Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

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

To insult someone we call him ‘bestial’. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can...

All evil is good become cancerous.

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

I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

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.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he...

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one...

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...

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.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

Las historias de viaje en el tiempo son demasiado divertidas para ser eliminadas simplemente por consideraciones mundanas sobre impracticabilidad o incluso imposibilidad.

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.