952 Quotes by Isaac Asimov

Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.

One way of saving on energy use would be to do away with unnecessary transportation. For instance, people commute between work and home, or travel long distances to engage in business conferences. With the development of improved communications and increasing automation, it will become possible in the not-too-distant future, for people to control and maintain business operations and machinery at a distance.

Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one.

You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can’t always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you’ve planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.

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.

Beliefs can’t be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly complete mental discruption results. Mild cases – hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced cases – madness and suicide.

There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn’t another behind it; no statement that hasn’t three meanings.

It’s really disheartening, the universal stupidity. I think that I wouldn’t grieve at mankind’s suicide through sheer evilness of heart, or through mere recklessness. There’s something so damned undignified at going to destruction through sheer thickheaded stupidity. What’s the use of being men if that’s how you have to die.

To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.