Isaac Asimov

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

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

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

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

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.

Feminine intuition? Is that what you wanted the robot for? You men. Faced with a woman reaching a correct conclusion and unable to accept the fact that she is your equal or superior in intelligence, you invent something called feminine intuition.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."

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

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

All of a sudden, space isn't friendly. All of a sudden, it's a place where people can die. . . . Many more people are going to die. But we can't explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can't do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties.

I'm gradually managing to cram my mind more and more full of things. I've got this beautiful mind and it's going to die, and it'll all be gone. And then I say, not in my case. Every idea I've ever had I've written down, and it's all there on paper. And I won't be gone; it'll be there.

Nonsense! The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.

Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.

Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked in school.

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

All roads lead to Trantor, says the old proverb, and that is where all stars end.

What would I do if I knew I only had six months to live? Type faster.

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

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.