Isaac Asimov quotes on science, intelligence and technology will inspire you to run your imagination wild.
Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia. He was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University.
Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific science fiction writers of all time. He is best known for his work Foundation series and I, Robot. He also pioneered the concept of the “robotics society”, where robots are used to help humans manage their everyday lives.
When he was three years old, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Asimov loved to learn new things at a very early age and taught himself how to read by the time he was just 5 years old. Asimov began writing at a young age, as he sold his first short story “Marooned Off Vesta” and published it in Amazing Stories in 1938 when he was just eighteen.
He attended Columbia University, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry. He worked at the Naval Aviation Experimental station during World War II and after earning his M.A. and Ph.D. started teaching biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.
However, Asimov is best known for his prolific writing career in science fiction in the 20th century. He wrote more than 500 books, 90,000 letters, and postcards, more than 380 short stories over his lifetime.
Asimov’s writing has been credited with helping to popularize science fiction as a genre, and he is often cited as an influence by other science fiction writers. He was also a strong advocate for science education and worked to promote literacy among adults and children.
Despite all of his stellar academic credentials, writing was his passion. He has received several awards and accolades throughout his life. He received a one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” for his most popular work, the Foundation series in 1966. He had also received 14 honorary doctorate degrees from different universities.
He continued to do what he loved till the end when he died on April 6, 1992, due to heart and kidney failure.
Here we are sharing a collection of Isaac Asimov quotes about democracy, ignorance, and stupidity for you to understand the science of life.
Isaac Asimov Quotes
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov
“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”
― Isaac Asimov
“People who don’t expect justice don’t have to suffer disappointment.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”
― Issac Asimov
“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
“Society is much more easily soothed than one’s own conscience.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov
“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”
― Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes About Ignorance
“All evil is good become cancerous.”
― Isaac Asimov
“It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.”
― Isaac Asimov
“people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”
― Isaac Asimov
“It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.”
― Issac Asimov
“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind
“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
― Isaac Asimov
“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Isaac Asimov Foundation Quotes
“I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing – I went into politics. It’s practically the same thing.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise.”
― Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
“It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“Weak emperors mean strong viceroys. ”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Isaac Asimov Quotes On Democracy
“Above all, never think you’re not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.”
― Isaac Asimov
“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere. ”
― Isaac Asimov
“Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
“Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Past glories are poor feeding.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“you just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”
― Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes On Anti Intellectualism
“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
― Isaac Asimov
“A circle has no end.”
― Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov
“You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge
“Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation
“The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
“You are the only one responsible for your own wants.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Any planet is ‘Earth’ to those that live on it.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”
― Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Funny Quotes
“Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.”
― Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
“Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.”
― Isaac Asimov
“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge
“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
“THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Last Question
“The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.”
― Isaac Asimov
“I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”
― Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes On Stupidity
“Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity”
― Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity
“It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction — its essence — has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
― Isaac Asimov
“What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.”
― Isaac Asimov
“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. ”
― Isaac Asimov
“But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don’t know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind
Isaac Asimov Book Quotes
“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?”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind
“All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.”
― Isaac Asimov
“If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job
that he isn’t worth discussing.”
― Isaac Asimov
“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.”
― Isaac Asimov
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov Quotes On Artificial Intelligence
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
― Isaac Asimov
“I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”
― Isaac Asimov
“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”
― Isaac Asimov
“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.”
― Isaac Asimov
“People think of education as something they can finish.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.”
― Isaac Asimov
Best Isaac Asimov Quotes
“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
― Isaac Asimov
“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.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“Isn’t it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us – and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Secret of the Universe
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov
“In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile ”
― Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions
“Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don’t see.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
“Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, “I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn’t that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
“I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
Did these Isaac Asimov quotes inspire you?
Throughout his life, he had written mainly science fiction, astronomy, biology, math, religion, and literary biography but at the end of his career, he started writing non-fiction books that helped people to understand science in an easy and humorous way. There is no doubt his books have influenced the science-fiction genre tremendously.
We hope Isaac Asimov quotes on Artificial Intelligence will be the same to inspire you to not always be learning but to also let your imagination run wild.
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