952 Quotes by Isaac Asimov

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

A nuclear blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.

even the purest and most high-minded scientist finds it expedient sometimes to assault the fortress of truth with the blunt weapon of trail and error. sometimes it works beautifully.

Science may be, and has been, misused, but the proper cure for that is not to replace science by non-science and sense by nonsense - but to replace science-misused by science well-used.

Kendim için "insan" kelimesinden başka bir tanım kullanmayı reddediyorum. Bana kalırsa medeniyet ve insanlık yok olmasın diye gösterilen çabaların önündeki hızlı nüfus artışı dışındaki en büyük engel, insanların kendi aralarında durmadan küçük gruplara bölünme ve oluşan her yeni grubun da yalnız kendini yücelterek komşularını hakir görme alışkanlıklarıdır.

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.

The theory of universal gravitation is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth. . . Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right?

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one—Marie, the famous Madame Curie—and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life---which is fundamentally dependent on light---to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.