Quotes from Isaac Asimov

He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.

Contra la estupidez, los propios dioses luchan en vano

Galaxy, he hated them! He stopped himself, drew a firm breath...There was no use thinking hate...He had learned to bear in silence. He ought not forget what he had learned now. Of all times, not now.

It was almost inevitable. Those who worked directly for the Squires were only too glad to identify themselves with the rulers and make up for their real inferiority by a tighter adherence to the rules of segregation, a harsh and haughty attitude toward their fellows.

We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.' 'For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of you. I don't. I want more good ones.

Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, How did you learn all this, Isaac? From you, Pappa, I said. From me? I don't know any of this. You didn't have to, Pappa, I said. You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.

Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since medieval times, it was a woman's purse.

The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: "No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.

Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.

The Earth, he said, is a large and very complex lifeboat. We still do not know what can or can't be done with a proper distribution of resources and it is notorious that to this very day we have not really made an effort to distribute them. In many places on Earth, food is wasted daily, and it is that knowledge that drives hungry men mad.

Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another—sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself—while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off.

They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.

The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he found he had nothing left. Everything cancelled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.

The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth.

They don't want equal time - they want all the time there is.

I've seen many people with status, but I'm still looking for a happy one. Status won't sit still under you; you have to continually fight to keep from sinking.

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.

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

People say 'It's as plain as the noise on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone hold a mirror up to you?

An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

I suppose there's no way of putting the mushroom cloud back into that nice, shiny uranium sphere.

Lamentarsi è una caratteristica innata della specie umana. Nel Secolo del Carbone la gente imprecava contro la macchina a vapore; in una commedia di Shakespeare un personaggio lamenta l'invenzione della polvere da sparo. Mille anni dopo ci si lamentava per la fabbricazione del cervello positronico.

For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it.

The secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all.