Isaac Asimov

• Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
  • Foundation (1942)

• 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.
  • Yours, Isaac Asimov (20 September 1973) page 329.

• 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.
  • Free Inquiry (Spring 1982) p. 9.

Three Laws of Robotics

• A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • Runaround (1942) This statement is known as "The First Law of Robotics"
• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • Runaround (1942) This statement is known as "The Second Law of Robotics"
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  • Runaround (1942) This statement is known as "The Third Law of Robotics"

• A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
  • ' (1985) This statement is known as "The Zeroth Law of Robotics"; a variant of it first occurred in ' (1950) as: "No robot may harm humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

Attributed:

• Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
• 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.
• 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.
• If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
• It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind
• There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
• To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Death

• In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
• Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
• Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

Knowledge and science

• A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
• If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
• Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
• 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.
• The facts, gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching.
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
• The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
• The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
• There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
• Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
• To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn.
• True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the United States is steadily dumbing down.
• When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
• Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.

Writing

• From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
• I write for the same reason I breathe— because if I didn't, I would die.
• If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
• Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject...they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.
• Well, I can type all day without getting tired.
  • Response to a question as to which he preferred, women or writing.
• Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
• I type and think at 90 words a minute.

Himself

• Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked.
• I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
• If I could trace my origins to Judas Maccabaeus or King David, that would not add one inch to my stature. It may well be that many East European Jews are descended from Khazars, I may be one of them. Who knows? And who cares?
• In 1936, I first wrote science fiction. It was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel... which died. I remember one sentence, "Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer.". That was the first Asimovian science-fiction sentence.
• Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

Computers

• All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
• I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.
• Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

Future

• 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.
• It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
• Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Other

• 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.
• How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
  • This is a mnemonic phrase: the number of letters in each word of the phrase is a decimal digit of pi
• It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
• It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.
• 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.
• United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.
• Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.
• Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime.
• No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.
• To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.

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