Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

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

Well, it was healthy to miss once in a while. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance.

Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't believe in it at all.

It is because you yourself fear the propaganda created, after all, only by the stupidity of your own bigots.

There's nothing like deduction. We've determined everything about our problem but the solution.

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal, honor and court etiquette.

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?

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

There can never be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corrdiors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.

I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless.

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they turn 40, they don't stop with sex just because they turn 40; they keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing.

The job of science will never be done, it will just sink deeper and deeper into never-ending complexity.

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

Self-preservation has frequently knuckled under to that tremendous yearning to get even.

Writing is hard work. The fact that I love doing it doesn't make it less hard work. People who love tennis will sweat themselves to exhaustion playing it, and the love of the game doesn't stop the sweating. The casual assumption that writers are unemployed bums because they don't go to the office and don't have a boss is something every writer has to live with. I have never known a writer who hasn't suffered as a result of this, hasn't resented it, and hasn't dreamed of murdering the next person who says "Boy, you've sure got it made. You just sit there and toss off a story or something whenever you feel like it."

Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.

Earth is a ball that is over 12,000 kilometres in diameter, and if it were modelled into an object the size of a billiard ball, with all its surface unevenness reproduced exactly to scale, the model would be smoother than an ordinary billiard ball and the ocean would be an all but unnoticeable mist of dampness over 70 percent of its surface.

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

What a human being believes, however, no matter with what ardor, is not necessarily objective truth.

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

Books ... hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.

An optimistic view of the future would indicate that before long, the clear necessity of expanding humanity's horizons would cause ... space settlements to be built. The construction would also serve as a great project that not only would be clearly of great benefit, but might induce human cooperation in something large enough to fire the heart and mind, and make people forget the petty quarrels that have engaged them for thousands of years in wars over insignificant scraps of earthly territory.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

Someone once asked me, "If you had your choice, Dr. Asimov, would it be women or writing?" My answer was, "Well, I can write for twelve hours at a time without getting tired."

In my fiction I am careful to make everything probable and to tie up all loose ends. Real life is not hampered by such considerations.

He could almost wish he were superstitious. He could then console himself with the thought that the casual meaningless meeting had really been directed by a knowing and purposeful Fate.

I joke sometimes to the effect that when I approach a part of a book where I must explain something I don't understand, I just type faster and faster and faster. Then, when I get to the part I don't understand, sheer inertia pushes me through. That's not literally true, of course, but there's something to it psychologically.

The foundation of all technology is fire.

Scientists have pushed back the horizon of time from the biblical 6,000 years to 4,600,000,000 years for the age of Earth a 760,000-fold increase.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.

The Bible and science agree in being unable to say anything certainly about what happened before the beginning. There is this difference. The Bible will never be able to tell us. It has reached its final form, and it simply doesn't say. Science, on the other hand, is still developing, and the time may come when it can answer questions that, at present, it cannot.

In the course of my fight with the school, I couldn't help but notice that I became a pariah. [...] Once, however, a fellow faculty member, making sure we were unobserved, said to me, "Isaac, the faculty is proud of you for your courage in fighting the administration for academic freedom."I said, "There's no courage involved in it. Don't you know my definition of academic freedom?""No. What's your definition of academic freedom?"I said, "Independent income."