Issac Asimov Quotes (29 Quotes)

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice as to how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' And Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.'

No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.

When asked what he would do if he only had six months to live Type faster.

I sit here and think, with more than a little astonishment, that I have been writing and publishing Science Fiction now for just three-eighths of a century. This isn't bad for someone who only admits to being in his late youth- or a little over thirty, if pinned down.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

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 was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

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.

That we have come as far as we have in forty years the 1930s to the 1970s is hopeful, though I believe it is more through the fact that Hitler's excesses made racism poisonous to any humane individual than through our own virtue. That we have much farther to go is incontestable.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The First Law of Robotics

What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

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

To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn.

It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

The trouble is that racial stereotypes, unfavourable to everyone but white men of northwest European extraction, were completely accepted, and indeed, scarcely noted in those days of only forty years ago the 1930s (except perhaps by the members of the groups victimized thereby).

Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime.

The vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about t.

It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself, especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything else - and I'm satisfied that it should.

In 1936, I first wrote science fiction. It was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel...which died. I remember one sentence, Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The Third Law of Robotics

A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. The Zeroth Law of Robotics

Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject... they would have spoiled my natural style made me observe caution would have hedged me with rules.

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to unlearn

Well, I can type all day without getting tired. In response to a question as to which he preferred, women or writing

Then Priss arrived, dragging a volume of colorlessness in with him, a drabness that was unaffected by the noise and the absolute splendor (no other word would describe it - or else it was the two martinis glowing inside me) that filled the room

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written

If I am right, then religious fundamentalists will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If THEY are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.

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.