Quotes from Isaac Asimov

Pero ¿podemos permitirnos el lujo de arriesgarnos? ¿Podemos arriesgar el presente por el bien de un nebuloso futuro?

You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line. Did it matter to a ground vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original or spontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) could be artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting upon it, would that not be just as well?

Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That's how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.

All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.

But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar systems. It had only one, function, administration; one purpose, government; and one manufactured product, law.

He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. "Back to oil and coal, are they?" he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.

You may uncover more and, eventually, what seems altogether a mystery to us now may unfold and become plain.

Characterized by strong faith reactions. Beliefs can't be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly complete mental disruption results. Mild cases—hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced cases—madness and suicide.

I do. It's a mass psychosis, an unprintable mob panic. Ga-LAX-y, Randu, what do you expect? Here you have a whole culture brought up to a blind, blubbering belief that a folk hero of the past has everything all planned out and is taking care of every little piece of their unprintable lives. The thought-pattern evoked has religious characteristics, and you know what that means.

I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.

Where the stars are scattered thinly,' quoted Barr, 'And the cold of space seeps in.

Life is a successive symphony of losses.

You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Baley said, sharply, "Nevertheless bound by friendship. Do not, for your own sake, test the force of our—" Now it was he who paused and, as though to his own surprise, completed the sentence impossibly, "—love.

You underestimate the depths to which mysticism can bury rationality, Golan.

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

Fara turned to Hardin. "Didn't you study psychology under Alurin?" Hardin answered, half in reverie: "Yes, I never completed my studies, though. I got tired of theory. I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing— I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.

Violence, came the retort, is the last refuge of the incompetent.

If we are always to draw back from change with the thought that the change may be for the worse, then there is no hope at all of ever escaping injustice.

But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity' is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.' 'It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand--at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war.

The day of the week on which the tour took place was known to all workers. All devices in its path ought to have been carefully neutralized or locked, since it was unreasonable to expect human beings to withstand the temptation to handle knobs, keys, handles and pushbuttons.

Now tell me what happened—in words. I want your translation of the mathematics.