952 Quotes by Isaac Asimov

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?

No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth...

When everything impossible had been eliminated and what remains is supernatural, then someone is lying.

In short, the age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate. Now that is gone, and the youngsters have their glazed eyes fixed on the television tube. The result is clear. True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down".

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

Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can bemore easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.'R. Giskard Reventlov

60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel

Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you.