Quotes from Isaac Asimov

I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.

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.

The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.

I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.

The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect--but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.

I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification...It's these respectable people here who create those hooligans out there.

However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There's no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference - but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.

It's the writing that teaches you.

I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right.

The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Galaxy! When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet?

Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

There is no merit to discipline under ideal circumstances. I must have it in the face of death or it is worthless.

Education isn't something you can finish.

They were scientists enough to admit that they were wrong.

Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!

The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.

You don't need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.

Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.

Author's Note: This story starts with section 6. This is not a mistake. I have my own subtle reasoning. So, just read, and enjoy.