Quotes from Isaac Asimov

You are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

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

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

Science is a mechanism, 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.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

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

A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.

No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.

If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

The dangers that face the world can, every one of them, be traced back to science. The salvations that may save the world will, every one of them, be traced back to science.

Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature.

It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.

That's the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that's what just science fiction is.

We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.

God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.