Quotes from Isaac Asimov

Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

To insult someone we call him 'besti*l'. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

The spell of power never quite releases its hold.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.

I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

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.

No vision of God and heaven ever experienced by the most exalted prophet can, in my opinion, match the vision of the universe as seen by Newton or Einstein

Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.)

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.

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." -R. Daneel Olivaw

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn.