952 Quotes by Isaac Asimov

Courtiers don’t take wagers against the king’s skill. There is the deadly danger of winning.

Consider the question suitably modified.

Life is not like a murder mystery. In mysteries people always do the same thing. Then when some little thing is out of line, some wise-guy amateur detective makes big deductions. In real life, people don’t do the same things all the time. They do different things at different times. In real life, people are crazy.

Enough, my very noble husband. You had another of your vacillating consultations with your councilors. Fine advisors.” With infinite scorn, “A herd of palsied purblind idiots hugging their sterile profits close to their sunken chests in the face of my father’s displeasure.

There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. “We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men.

The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. Hari.

The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate.

Well, there is one – a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man whom they call the Mule.” “The Mule?” She considered. “Ever hear of him, Torie?

If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.