Quotes from Isaac Asimov

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Tell me why the stars do shine, Tell me why the ivy twines, Tell me what makes skies so blue, And I'll tell you why I love you. Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine, Tropisms make the ivy twine, Raleigh scattering make skies so blue, Testicular hormones are why I love you.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

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

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

People think of education as something they can finish.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

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.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

People think of education as something that they can finish.

People think of education as something they can finish.

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation.

And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it's bad for you.