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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9ac9f4a | We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0f2fff8 | Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0c6eca0 | 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? | scientific-paradigm scientific-method | Isaac Asimov | |
| d96d2f4 | Every man's position on Earth is restricted to the distance he can walk.' -- "The Last Trump" | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 2892b4b | Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 6f09ad0 | Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another. Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with? And I certainly refuse to change the.. | the-dying-night asimov isaac-asimov isaac science-fiction | Isaac Asimov | |
| 7d60330 | The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong. | right-and-wrong | Isaac Asimov | |
| b8e0e1d | For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 20b65ec | The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 7e6173a | Consider the question suitably modified. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| f4c33f7 | The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he found he had nothing left. Everything cancelled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 4d2a8cc | the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. | asimov foundation rotten tree | Isaac Asimov | |
| 33acc95 | What was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb; and once left, it could not be re-entered. | thoughtful-reflection | Isaac Asimov | |
| ae37482 | 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. | history marie-curie marie-skłodowska-curie nobel-prize pierre-curie nobel-laureate | Isaac Asimov | |
| 9f54a3e | She possesses what someone once described to me as all the unlovable virtues. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0304927 | It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. | scientific-abstraction | Isaac Asimov | |
| a49dc06 | There are many people, many worlds who believe in supernaturalism in one form or another... religion, if you like the word better. We may disagree with them in one way or another, but we are as likely to be wrong in our disbelief as they in their belief. In any case, there is no disgrace in such belief and my questions were not intended as insults. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 23e22ec | They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed. | stagnation | Isaac Asimov | |
| fa3b41e | Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain". "I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case." | robotics science-fiction sociology | Isaac Asimov | |
| 00fbecf | if we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will run better and, most of all, a world in which the individual will count for more, not less. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0537abb | Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| bf06b1e | Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| f05ae0d | I am trying now to re-create in my mind the picture of the man as I saw him in 1939- he, the revered author of , I the novice. I think I can rely on my near-photographic memory for the purpose. (I call it "near-photographic" because I can only remember things that happen to be lying around near photographs.) Let's see, as I recall, he is six-feet seven-inches tall (when he is sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Th.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0097f96 | Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 5a4be69 | To a thoughtful biographer, [Ebling Mis's house] was "the symbolization of a retreat from a non-academic reality", a society columnist gushed silkily at its "frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless disorder", a University Ph.D called it brusquely, "bookish, but unorganized", a non-university friend said, "good for a drink anytime and you can put your feet on the sofa", and a breezy newsweekly broadcast, that went in for color, spoke of.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| e9fbf98 | 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? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo? | Isaac Asimov | ||
| d934644 | A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. And you, Lee, have got to worry even if you must kill yourself to invent something to worry about. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 7ca6609 | Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| aa3b5e2 | Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 0aaf680 | I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 22a1af7 | Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past--never on yourselves. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| bbe7fba | 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. They make the children come up here once a year, after they're five. I don't know if it does any good. They don't get enough of it, really, and the first few times they scream themselves into hysteria. They ought to start as soon as .. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 06677ac | The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control. | urbanization | Isaac Asimov | |
| 93a1b49 | There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously .. | revolution | Isaac Asimov | |
| 3d70f3f | It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 442ec4b | For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want - but an end? | existence life | Isaac Asimov | |
| d99b224 | You wash your hands, don't you?" Bayley's eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. "Yes," he said. "All right. I suppose it's a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands as to be unable to clean an oily mechanism by hand even in a emergency. Still, in the ordinary course of living, the revulsion keeps you clean, which is good." | revulsion instability | Isaac Asimov | |
| 7e340cb | Psychohistory was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 5287aa5 | People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| bc71ad2 | Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was surprisingly proficient. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| a2a9f62 | La forma mas facil de solucionar un problema es negar su existencia. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| be26dbb | Yet there was this to be said for unfavorable relationships in the wealth-distribution equation. It meant the existence of a leisure class and the development of an attractive way of life which, at its best, encouraged culture and grace. As long as the other end of the scale was not too badly off, as long as the leisure classes did not entirely forget their responsibilities while enjoying their privileges, as long as their culture took no o.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 059deb3 | The clown's eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. "But they kept me away from you earlier-and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship." | magnifico | Isaac Asimov | |
| 52719b6 | He's but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other. | Isaac Asimov |