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Many Adults, Whether Consciously Or Unconsciously, Find It Beneath Their Adult Dignity To Do Anything As Childish As Read A Book, Think A Thought, Or Get An Idea. Adults Are Rarely Embarrased At Having Forgotten What Little Algebra Or Geography They Once Learned

-Isaac Asimov

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Many Adults, Whether Consciously

Isaac Asimov

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Many Adults, Whether Consciously Or Unconsciously, Find It Beneath Their Adult Dignity To Do Anything As Childish As Read A Book, Think A Thought, Or Get An Idea. Adults Are Rarely Embarrased At Having Forgotten What Little Algebra Or Geography They Once Learned

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Properly Read, The Bible Is The Most Potent Force For Atheism Ever Conceived.

If There Is A God

Korell Is That Frequent Phenomenon In History : The Republic Whose Ruler Has Every Attribute Of The Absolute Monarch But The Name. It Therefore Enjoyed The Usual Despotism Unrestrained Even By Those Two Moderating Influences In The Legitimate Monarchies: Regal "honor" And Court Etiquette.

Science Does Not Promise Absolute Truth, Nor Does It Consider That Such A Thing Necessarily Exists. Science Does Not Even Promise That Everything In The Universe Is Amenable To The Scientific Process.

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.

It's The Writing That Teaches You.

Grip The Nettle Firmly And It Will Become A Stick With Which To Beat Your Enemy.

After Years Of Finding Mathematics Easy, I Finally Reached Integral Calculus And Came Up Against A Barrier. I Realized That This Was As Far As I Could Go, And To This Day I Have Never Successfully Gone Beyond It In Any But The Most Superficial Way.

A Myth Or Legend Is Simply Not Made Up Out Of A Vacuum. Nothing Is--or Can Be. Somehow There Is A Kernel Of Truth Behind It, However Distorted That Might Be.

If All Human Beings Understood History, They Might Cease Making The Same Stupid Mistakes Over And Over.

Science Is A Mechanism, A Way Of Trying To Improve Your Knowledge Of Nature. It's A System For Testing Your Thoughts Against The Universe, And Seeing Whether They Match.

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.

All Evil Is Good Become Cancerous.

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.

I Have Been Told That A Young Would-be Composer Wrote To Mozart Asking Advice About How To Compose A Symphony. Mozart Responded That A Symphony Was A Complex And Demanding Form And It Would Be Better To Start With Something Simpler. The Young Man Protested, 'but, Herr Mozart, You Wrote Symphonies When You Were Younger Than I Am Now.' Mozart Replied, 'i Never Asked How.

Inspect Every Piece Of Pseudoscience And You Will Find A Security Blanket.

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.

People Are Entirely Too Disbelieving Of Coincidence.

A Scientist Is As Weak And Human As Any Man, But The Pursuit Of Science May Ennoble Him Even Against His Will.

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.

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.

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.

I'm Gradually Managing To Cram My Mind More And More Full Of Things. I've Got This Beautiful Mind And It's Going To Die, And It'll All Be Gone. And Then I Say, Not In My Case. Every Idea I've Ever Had I've Written Down, And It's All There On Paper. And I Won't Be Gone; It'll Be There.

While He Lives, He Must Think; While He Thinks, He Must Dream.

Why Continue? Because We Must. Because We Have The Call. Because It Is Nobler To Fight For Rationality Without Winning Than To Give Up In The Face Of Continued Defeats. Because Whatever True Progress Humanity Makes Is Through The Rationality Of The Occasional Individual And Because Any One Individual We May Win For The Cause May Do More For Humanity Than A Hundred Thousand Who Hug Their Superstitions To Their Breast.

It Seems To Me, Golan, That The Advance Of Civilization Is Nothing But An Exercise In The Limiting Of Privacy.

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.

We Are All Victimized By The Natural Perversity Of Inanimate Objects...and The Assorted Human Beings Who Perpetuate And Maintain This Perversity.

Inanimate Objects

I Have Written 240 Books On A Wide Variety Of Topics. . . . Some Of It I Based On Education I Received In My School, But Most Of It Was Backed By Other Ways Of Learning - Chiefly In The Books I Obtained In The Public Library.

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."

Where Is The World Whose People Don't Prefer A Comfortable, Warm, And Well-worn Belief, However Illogical, To The Chilly Winds Of Uncertainty.

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.

Guarantees That

[a]ll Knowledge Is One. When A Light Brightens And Illuminates A Corner Of A Room, It Adds To The General Illumination Of The Entire Room. Over And Over Again, Scientific Discoveries Have Provided Answers To Problems That Had No Apparent Connection With The Phenomena That Gave Rise To The Discovery.

Democracy Cannot Survive Overpopulation.

There Is Nothing Frightening About An Eternal Dreamless Sleep. Surely It Is Better Than Eternal Torment In Hell And Eternal Boredom In Heaven.

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.

The Easiest Way To Solve A Problem Is To Deny It Exists.

At Two-tenths The Speed Of Light, Dust And Atoms Might Not Do Significant Damage Even In A Voyage Of 40 Years, But The Faster You Go, The Worse It Is--space Begins To Become Abrasive. When You Begin To Approach The Speed Of Light, Hydrogen Atoms Become Cosmic-ray Particles, And They Will Fry The Crew. ...so 60,000 Kilometers Per Second May Be The Practical Speed Limit For Space Travel.

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?"

It Is The Chief Characteristic Of The Religion Of Science That It Works.

Characteristics

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.

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.)

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.

Great Depression

The Three Theorems Of Psychohistorical Quantitivity: The Population Under Scrutiny Is Oblivious To The Existence Of The Science Of Psychohistory. The Time Periods Dealt With Are In The Region Of 3 Generations. The Population Must Be In The Billions (±75 Billions) For A Statistical Probability To Have A Psychohistorical Validity.

Was There Anything More Exciting In Life Than Seeking Answers?

Where Any Answer Is Possible, All Answers Are Meaningless.

The Advance Of Genetic Engineering Makes It Quite Conceivable That We Will Begin To Design Our Own Evolutionary Progress.

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.

Fiction Stories

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.

Believe In Yourself

The Vast Majority, Who Believe In Astrology And Think That The Planets Have Nothing Better To Do Than Form A Code That Will Tell Them Whether Tomorrow Is A Good Day To Close A Business Deal Or Not, Become All The More Excited And Enthusiastic.

The Important Prediction Is Not The Automobile, But The Parking Problem; Not Radio, But The Soap Opera; Not The Income Tax, But The Expense Account; Not The Bomb, But The Nuclear Stalemate

The Earth Faces Environmental Problems Right Now That Threaten The Imminent Destruction Of Civilization And The End Of The Planet As A Livable World. Humanity Cannot Afford To Waste Its Financial And Emotional Resources On Endless, Meaningless Quarrels Between Each Group And All Others. There Must Be A Sense Of Globalism In Which The World Unites To Solve The Real Problems That Face All Groups Alike.

It Is The Nature Of The Mind That Makes Individuals Kin, And The Differences In The Shape, Form Or Manner Of The Material Atoms Out Of Whose Intricate Relationships That Mind Is Built Are Altogether Trivial.

If We Only Obey Those Rules That We Think Are Just And Reasonable, Then No Rule Will Stand, For There Is No Rule That Some Will Not Think Is Unjust And Unreasonable.

It Is Always Useful, You See, To Subject The Past Life Of Reform Politicians To Rather Inquisitive Research.

It Is No Defense Of Superstition And Pseudoscience To Say That It Brings Solace And Comfort To People. . . . If Solace And Comfort Are How We Judge The Worth Of Something, Then Consider That Tobacco Brings Solace And Comfort To Smokers; Alcohol Brings It To Drinkers; Drugs Of All Kinds Bring It To Addicts; The Fall Of Cards And The Run Of Horses Bring It To Gamblers; Cruelty And Violence Bring It To Sociopaths. Judge By Solace And Comfort Only And There Is No Behavior We Ought To Interfere With.

So The Universe Is Not Quite As You Thought It Was. You'd Better Rearrange Your Beliefs, Then. Because You Certainly Can't Rearrange The Universe.

I Would Argue That A Truly Developed Country Would Be Beyond Presidents And Kings. In A World With Some Semblance Of Equality, Each Liberal-minded Woman, Each Gay Person, And Indeed Almost Every Person Could Be Their Own President. In A World Of Equals, What Real Service Does A Ruler Provide?

The Great Secret Of The Successful Fool Is That He's No Fool At All

Science Can Amuse And Fascinate Us All, But It Is Engineering That Changes The World.

The Fundamentalists Deny That Evolution Has Taken Place; They Deny That The Earth And The Universe As A Whole Are More Than A Few Thousand Years Old, And So On. There Is Ample Scientific Evidence That The Fundamentalists Are Wrong In These Matters, And That Their Notions Of Cosmogony Have About As Much Basis In Fact As The Tooth Fairy Has.

The First Step In Making Rabbit Stew Is Catching The Rabbit.

If There Is A Category Of Human Being For Whom His Work Ought To Speak For Itself, It Is The Writer.

I Even Got A Letter From A Young Woman In British Columbia That Began As Follows: 'today I Am Eighteen. I Am Sitting At The Window, Looking Out At The Rain, And Thinking How Much I Love You.'

He Always Pictured Himself A Libertarian, Which To My Way Of Thinking Means "i Want The Liberty To Grow Rich And You Can Have The Liberty To Starve". It's Easy To Believe That No One Should Depend On Society For Help When You Yourself Happen Not To Need Such Help.

If You Were To Insist I Was A Robot, You Might Not Consider Me Capable Of Love In Some Mystic Human Sense, But You Would Not Be Able To Distinguish My Reactions From That Which You Would Call Love So What Difference Would It Make?

It Is Not So Much That I Have Confidence In Scientists Being Right, But That I Have So Much In Nonscientists Being Wrong.

Have Confidence

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.

Intelligence Is A Valuable Thing, But It Is Not Usually The Key To Survival. Sheer Fecundity ... Usually Counts. The Intelligent Gorilla Doesn't Do As Well As The Less Intelligent But More-fecund Rat, Which Doesn't Do As Well As The Still-less-intelligent But Still-more-fecund Cockroach, Which Doesn't Do As Well As The Minimally-intelligent But Maximally-fecund Bacterium.

Why This Reluctance To Make The Change? We Fear The Process Of Reeducation.

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.

Theories Are Not So Much Wrong As Incomplete

It Is In Meeting The Great Tests That Mankind Can Most Successfully Rise To Great Heights. Out Of Danger And Restless Insecurity Comes The Force That Pushes Mankind To Newer And Loftier Conquests.

Once You Get It Into Your Head That Somebody Is Controlling Events, You Can Interpret Everything In That Light And Find No Reasonable Certainty Anywhere.

What Do You Call That Nice, Shiny White Metal They Use To Make Sidings And Airplanes Out Of? Aluminum, Right? Aluminum, Pronounced 'uh-loo-mih-num', Right? Anybody Knows That! But Do You Know How The British Spell It? 'aluminium', Pronounced 'al-yoo-mih-nee-um'. Ever Hear Anything So Ridiculous? The French And Germans Spell It 'aluminium', Too, But They're Foreigners Who Don't Speak Earth-standard. You'd Think The British, However, Using Our Language, Would Be More Careful

A Robot May Not Injure A Human Being, Or, Through Inaction, Allow A Human Being To Come To Harm.

On Earth, We Are Unmanned By Our Longing For A Pastoral Past That Never Really Existed; And That, If It Had Existed, Could Never Exist Again...on The Moon, There Is No Past To Long For Or Dream About. There Is No Direction But Forward.

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.

One Might Suppose That Reality Must Be Held To At All Costs. However, Though That May Be The Moral Thing To Do, It Is Not Necessarily The Most Useful Thing To Do. The Greeks Themselves Chose The Ideal Over The Real In Their Geometry And Demonstrated Very Well That Far More Could Be Achieved By Consideration Of Abstract Line And Form Than By A Study Of The Real Lines And Forms Of The World; The Greater Understanding Achieved Through Abstraction Could Be Applied Most Usefully To The Very Reality That Was Ignored In The Process Of Gaining Knowledge.

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.

Surely No Child, And Few Adults, Have Ever Watched A Bird In Flight Without Envy.

I Am Not Responsible For What Other People Think. I Am Responsible Only For What I Myself Think, And I Know What That Is. No Idea I've Ever Come Up With Has Ever Struck Me As A Divine Revelation. Nothing I Have Ever Observed Leads Me To Think There Is A God Watching Over Me.

Any Fool Can Tell A Crisis When It Arrives. The Real Service To The State Is To Detect It In Embryo.

Nothing Has To Be True, But Everything Has To Sound True.

There Is An Art To Science, And A Science In Art; The Two Are Not Enemies, But Different Aspects Of The Whole.

Life Originated In The Sea, And About Eighty Percent Of It Is Still There.

You Don't Need To Predict The Future. Just Choose A Future -- A Good Future, A Useful Future -- And Make The Kind Of Prediction That Will Alter Human Emotions And Reactions In Such A Way That The Future You Predicted Will Be Brought About. Better To Make A Good Future Than Predict A Bad One.

It Is Remarkable, Hardin, How The Religion Of Science Has Grabbed Hold.

In My Life There Have Been Several Individuals Whose Presence Made It Easier For Me To Think, Pleasanter To Make My Responses.

If A Conclusion Is Not Poetically Balanced, It Cannot Be Scientifically True.

Science Fiction Writers Foresee The Inevitable, And Although Problems And Catastrophes May Be Inevitable, Solutions Are Not.

How Many People Is The Earth Able To Sustain?

There Are No Nations! There Is Only Humanity. And If We Don't Come To Understand That Right Soon, There Will Be No Nations, Because There Will Be No Humanity.

I Am Not A Speed Reader. I Am A Speed Understander.

So, Then, What Is Style? There Are Two Chief Aspects Of Any Piece Of Writing: 1) What You Say And 2) How You Say It. The Former Is "content" And The Latter Is "style."

The Three Laws Of Robotics: 1: A Robot May Not Injure A Human Being Or, Through Inaction, Allow A Human Being To Come To Harm; 2: A Robot Must Obey The Orders Given It By Human Beings Except Where Such Orders Would Conflict With The First Law; 3: A Robot Must Protect Its Own Existence As Long As Such Protection Does Not Conflict With The First Or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A Robot May Not Harm Humanity, Or, By Inaction, Allow Humanity To Come To Harm.

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.

Unfortunately, In Many Cases, People Who Write Science Fiction Violate The Laws Of Nature, Not Because They Want To Make A Point, But Because They Don't Know What The Laws Of Nature Are.

Why ... Did So Many People Spend Their Lives Not Trying To Find Answers To Questions -- Not Even Thinking Of Questions To Begin With? Was There Anything More Exciting In Life Than Seeking Answers?

It's Not So Much What You Have To Learn If You Accept Weird Theories, It's What You Have To Unlearn.

A Good Question Is, Of Course, The Key By Which Infinite Answers Can Be Educed.

You See, Proteins, As I Probably Needn't Tell You, Are Immensely Complicated Groupings Of Amino Acids And Certain Other Specialized Compounds, Arranged In Intricate Three-dimensional Patterns That Are As Unstable As Sunbeams On A Cloudy Day. It Is This Instability That Is Life, Since It Is Forever Changing Its Position In An Effort To Maintain Its Identity--in The Manner Of A Long Rod Balanced On An Acrobat's Nose.

What Would You Consider A Good Job?" Answered As Follows: "a Good Job Is One In Which I Don't Have To Work, And Get Paid A Lot Of Money." When I Heard That I Cheered And Yelled And Felt That He Should Be Given An A+, For He Had Perfectly Articulated The American Dream Of Those Who Despise Knowledge. What A Politician That Kid Would Have Made.

Intelligence Is An Accident Of Evolution, And Not Necessarily An Advantage.

Even As A Youngster, Though, I Could Not Bring Myself To Believe That If Knowledge Presented Danger, The Solution Was Ignorance.

I Discovered, To My Amazement, That All Through History There Had Been Resistance ... And Bitter, Exaggerated, Last-stitch Resistance ... To Every Significant Technological Change That Had Taken Place On Earth. Usually The Resistance Came From Those Groups Who Stood To Lose Influence, Status, Money...as A Result Of The Change. Although They Never Advanced This As Their Reason For Resisting It. It Was Always The Good Of Humanity That Rested Upon Their Hearts.

Technological Change

You Wait For The War To Happen Like Vultures. If You Want To Help, Prevent The War. Don't Save The Remnants. Save Them All.

In Theory, There Is Nothing The Computer Can Do That The Human Mind Can Not Do. The Computer Merely Takes A Finite Amount Of Data And Performs A Finite Number Of Operations Upon Them. The Human Mind Can Duplicate The Process

When I Sit Down At The Typewriter, I Write. Someone Once Asked Me If I Had A Fixed Routine Before I Start, Like Setting Up Exercises, Sharpening Pencils, Or Having A Drink Of Orange Juice. I Said, "no, The Only Thing I Do Before I Start Writing Is To Make Sure That I'm Close Enough To The Typewriter To Reach The Keys."

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.

God, How That Stings! I've Spent A Lifetime Loving Science Fiction And Now I Find That You Must Expect Nothing Of Something That's Just Science Fiction.

To Any Who Know The Star Field Well From One Certain Reference Point, Stars Are As Individual As People. Jump Ten Parsecs, However, And Not Even Your Own Sun Is Recognizable.

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.

The Soft Bonds Of Love Are Indifferent To Life And Death. They Hold Through Time So That Yesterday’s Love Is Part Of Today’s And The Confidence In Tomorrow’s Love Is Also Part Of Today’s. And When One Dies, The Memory Lives In The Other, And Is Warm And Breathing. And When Both Die - I Almost Believe, Rationalist Though I Am - That Somewhere It Remains, Indestructible And Eternal, Enriching All Of The Universe By The Mere Fact That Once It Existed.

Knowledge Is Indivisible. When People Grow Wise In One Direction, They Are Sure To Make It Easier For Themselves To Grow Wise In Other Directions As Well. On The Other Hand, When They Split Up Knowledge, Concentrate On Their Own Field, And Scorn And Ignore Other Fields, They Grow Less Wise - Even In Their Own Field.

In All The Known History Of Mankind, Advances Have Been Made Primarily In Physical Technology; In The Capacity Of Handling The Inanimate World About Man. Control Of Self And Society Has Been Left To To Chance Or To The Vague Gropings Of Intuitive Ethical Systems Based On Inspiration And Emotion. As A Result No Culture Of Greater Stability Than About Fifty-five Percent Has Ever Existed, And These Only As The Result Of Great Human Misery.

To Surrender To Ignorance And Call It God Has Always Been Premature, And It Remains Premature Today.

Naturally, There's Got To Be A Limit For I Don't Expect To Live Forever, But I Do Intend To Hang On As Long As Possible.

You Don't Have To Be Able To Lay Eggs To Know When One Of Them Is Rotten.

Scientific Truth Is Beyond Loyalty And Disloyalty.

As Artists And Traders In Medieval Cities Began To Form Organizations, They Instituted Tough Initiation Ceremonies. Journeymen In Bergen, Norway, Were Shoved Down A Chimney, Thrown Three Times Into The Sea, And Soundly Whipped. Such Rites Made Belonging To The Guild Or Corporation More Precious To Those Who Were Accepted, And Survived.

Until Now In World's History, Whenever We've Had A Dark Age, Its Been Temporary And Local. And Other Parts Of The World Have Been Doing Fine. And Eventually, They Help You Get Out Of The Dark Age. We Are Now Facing A Possible Dark Age Which Is Going To Be World-wide And Permanent! That's Not Fun. That's A Different Thing. But Once We Have Established Many Worlds, We Can Do Whatever We Want As Long As We Do It One World At A Time.

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.

The Most Exciting Phrase To Hear In Science, The One That Heralds New Discoveries, Is Not 'eureka!' But 'that's Funny...'

I Don't Think I've Ever Held A Racket In My Hand ... There's Got To Be Somebody In The Us Who Isn't Trying To Play Tennis And Stinking Up The Court.

To Test A Perfect Theory With Imperfect Instruments Did Not Impress The Greek Philosophers As A Valid Way To Gain Knowledge.

All You Have To Do Is Take A Close Look At Yourself And You Will Understand Everyone Else.

Look At Yourself

There Is No One So Insufferable As A Person Who Gives No Other Excuse For A Peculiar Action Than Saying He Had Been Directed To It In A Dream.

Uncertainty That Comes From Knowledge (knowing What You Don't Know) Is Different From Uncertainty Coming From Ignorance.

To Me It Seems To Be Important To Believe People To Be Good Even If They Tend To Be Bad, Because Your Own Joy And Happiness In Life Is Increased That Way, And The Pleasures Of The Belief Outweigh The Occasional Disappointments. To Be A Cynic About People Works Just The Other Way Around And Makes You Incapable About Enjoying The Good Things.

I Expect Death To Be Nothingness And, For Removing Me From All Possible Fears Of Death, I Am Thankful To Atheism.

Do Not Forget That A Traitor Within Our Ranks, Known To Us, Can Do More Harm To The Enemy Than A Loyal Man Can Do Good To Us.

Radiation, Unlike Smoking, Drinking, And Overeating, Gives No Pleasure, So The Possible Victims Object.

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.

The Intelligent Man Is Never Bored.

Many A Prophecy, By The Mere Force Of Its Being Believed, Is Transmuted To Fact.

Law Of Attraction

Before Another Century Is Done It Will Be Hard For People To Imagine A Time When Humanity Was Confined To One World, And It Will Seem To Them Incredible That There Was Ever Anybody Who Doubted The Value Of Space And Wanted To Turn His Or Her Back On The Universe.

The Greatest Inventors Are Unknown To Us. Someone Invented The Wheel - But Who?

To Make Discoveries, You Have To Be Curious About Why The Universe Is The Way It Is.

Part Of The Inhumanity Of The Computer Is That, Once It Is Competently Programmed And Working Smoothly, It Is Completely Honest.

Computerization Eliminates The Middleman

Science Doesn't Purvey Absolute Truth. Science Is A Mechanism... For Testing Your Thoughts Against The Universe.

If Knowledge Can Create Problems, It Is Not Through Ignorance That We Can Solve Them.

Old People Think Young People Haven't Learned About Love. Young People Think Old People Have Forgotten About Love.

But Life Is Glorious When It Is Happy; Days Are Carefree When They Are Happy; The Interplay Of Thought And Imagination Is Far And 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.

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.

At Odd And Unpredictable Times, We Cling In Fright To The Past .

Since Emotions Are Few And Reasons Are Many (said The Robot Giscard) The Behavior Of A Crowd Can Be More Easily Predicted Than The Behavior Of One Person.

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.

Humanity Is Cutting Down Its Forests, Apparently Oblivious To The Fact That We May Not Be Able To Live Without Them.

Human Beings Sometimes Find A Kind Of Pleasure In Nursing Painful Emotions, In Blaming Themselves Without Reason Or Even Against Reason.

To All My Gentle Readers Who Have Treated Me With Love For Over 30 Years, I Must Say Farewell. It Has Always Been My Ambition To Die In Harness With My Head Face Down On A Keyboard And My Nose Caught Between Two Of The Keys, But That's Not The Way It Worked Out. I Have Had A Long And Happy Life And I Have No Complaints About The Ending, Thereof, And So Farewell - Farewell.

Scientists Expect To Be Improved On And Corrected; They Hope To Be

Nonsense! The Most Hopelessly Stupid Man Is He Who Is Not Aware That He Is Wise.

Science Is Complex And Chilling. The Mathematical Language Of Science Is Understood By Very Few. The Vistas It Presents Are Scary-an Enormous Universe Ruled By Chance And Impersonal Rules, Empty And Uncaring, Ungraspable And Vertiginous. How Comfortable To Turn Instead To A Small World, Only A Few Thousand Years Old, And Under God's Personal; And Immediate Care; A World In Which You Are His Peculiar Concern.

Every Religion Seems Like A Fantasy To Outsiders, But As Holy Truth To Those Of The Faith.

All Humanity Could Share A Common Insanity And Be Immersed In A Common Illusion While Living In A Common Chaos. That Can't Be Disproved, But We Have No Choice But To Follow Our Senses.

Intelligence Is An Extremely Subtle Concept. It's A Kind Of Understanding That Flourishes If It's Combined With A Good Memory, But Exists Anyway Even In The Absence Of Good Memory. It's The Ability To Draw Consequences From Causes, To Make Correct Inferences, To Foresee What Might Be The Result, To Work Out Logical Problems, To Be Reasonable, Rational, To Have The Ability To Understand The Solution From Perhaps Insufficient Information. You Know When A Person Is Intelligent, But You Can Be Easily Fooled If You Are Not Yourself Intelligent.

I Do Not Use Airplanes. They Strike Me As Unsporting. You Can Have An Automobile Accident-and Survive. You Can Be On A Sinking Ship-and Survive. You Can Be In An Earthquake, Fire, Volcanic Eruption, Tornado, What You Will-and Survive. But If Your Plane Crashes, You Do Not Survive. And I Say The Heck With It.

Happiness Is Doing It Rotten Your Own Way.

Past Glories Are Poor Feeding.

And It Came To Pass That Ac Learned How To Reverse The Direction Of Entropy. But There Was Now No Man To Whom Ac Might Give The Answer Of The Last Question. No Matter. The Answer - By Demonstration - Would Take Care Of That, Too. For Another Timeless Interval, Ac Thought How Best To Do This. Carefully, Ac Organized The Program. The Consciousness Of Ac Encompassed All Of What Had Been A Universe And Brooded Over What Was Now Chaos. Step By Step, It Must Be Done. And Ac Said, "let There Be Light!" And There Was Light...

There Are No Happy Endings In History, Only Crisis Points That Pass.

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 That One Is An Atheist, Because It Assumed Knowledge That One Didn't Have. Somehow It Was Better To Say One Was A Humanist Or Agnostic. I Don't Have The Evidence To Prove That God Doesn't Exist, But I So Strongly Suspect That He Doesn't That I Don't Want To Waste My Time.

We're Forever Teetering On The Brink Of The Unknowable, And Trying To Understand What Can't Be Understood.

You Show Me Someone Who Can't Understand People And I'll Show You Someone Who Has Built Up A False Image Of Himself.

Science Can Be Introduced To Children Well Or Poorly. If Poorly, Children Can Be Turned Away From Science; They Can Develop A Lifelong Antipathy; They Will Be In A Far Worse Condition Than If They Had Never Been Introduced To Science At All.

Any Teacher That Can Be Replaced By A Computer Should Be Replaced By A Computer.

If I Were Not An Atheist, I Would Believe In A God Who Would Choose To Save People On The Basis Of The Totality Of Their Lives And Not The Pattern Of Their Words. I Think He Would Prefer An Honest And Righteous Atheist To A Tv Preacher Whose Every Word Is God, God, God And Whose Every Deed Is Foul, Foul, Foul.

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."

Democracies Have

People Are Entirely Too Disbelieving Of Coincidence. They Are Far Too Ready To Dismiss It And To Build Arcane Structures Of Extremely Rickety Substance In Order To Avoid It. I, On The Other Hand, See Coincidence Everywhere As An Inevitable Consequence Of The Laws Of Probability, According To Which Having No Unusual Coincidence Is Far More Unusual Than Any Coincidence Could Possibly Be.

To Succeed, Planning Alone Is Insufficient. One Must Improvise As Well.

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.

Politically Popular Speech Has Always Been Protected: Even The Jews Were Free To Say ‘heil Hitler.’

The Age Of The Pulp Magazine Was The Last In Which Youngsters, To Get Their Primitive Material, Were Forced To Be Literate.

To Insult Someone We Call Him 'bestial. For Deliberate Cruelty And Nature, 'human' Might Be The Greater Insult.

Having Reached 451 Books As Of Now Doesn't Help The Situation. If I Were To Be Dying Now, I Would Be Murmuring, "too Bad! Only Four Hundred Fifty-one." (those Would Be My Next-to-last Words. The Last Ones Will Be: "i Love You, Janet.") [they Were. -janet.]

In Life, People Will Take You At Your Own Reckoning.

Not Good Enough

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.

I Wish That I Could Say I Was Optimistic About The Human Race. I Love Us All, But We Are So Stupid And Shortsighted That I Wonder If We Can Lift Our Eyes To The World About Us Long Enough Not To Commit Suicide.

If You Have Talent, You Will Receive Some Measure Of Success - But Only If You Persist.

The Lucky Few Who Can Be Involved In Creative Work Of Any Sort Will Be The True Elite Of Mankind, For They Alone Will Do More Than Serve A Machine.

All The Hundreds Of Millions Of People Who, In Their Time, Believed The Earth Was Flat Never Succeeded In Unrounding It By An Inch.

I Type 90 Words Per Minute On The Typewriter; I Type 100 Words Per Minute On The Word Processor. But, Of Course, I Don't Keep That Up Indefinitely - Every Once In A While I Do Have To Think A Few Seconds.

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.

I Made Up My Mind Long Ago To Follow One Cardinal Rule In All My Writing-to Be Clear. I Have Given Up All Thought Of Writing Poetically Or Symbolically Or Experimentally, Or In Any Of The Other Modes That Might (if I Were Good Enough) Get Me A Pulitzer Prize. I Would Write Merely Clearly And In This Way Establish A Warm Relationship Between Myself And My Readers, And The Professional Critics-well, They Can Do Whatever They Wish.

Today's Science Fiction Is Tomorrow's Science Fact.

It’s A Poor Atom Blaster That Won’t Point Both Ways.

I Do Not Fear Computers. I Fear The Lack Of Them.

University President: Why Is It That You Physicists Always Require So Much Expensive Equipment? Now The Department Of Mathematics Requires Nothing But Money For Paper, Pencils, And Erasers . . . And The Department Of Philosophy Is Better Still. It Doesn't Even Ask For Erasers.

... You Just Can't Differentiate Between A Robot And The Very Best Of Humans.

The World In General Disapproves Of Creativity, And To Be Creative In Public Is Particularly Bad. Even To Speculate In Public Is Rather Worrisome.

Postulates Are Based On Assumption And Adhered To By Faith. Nothing In The Universe Can Shake Them.

Custom Is Second Nature. Be Accustomed To A Bald Head, Sufficiently Accustomed, And Hair On It Would Seem Monstrous.

The Human Mind Works At Low Efficiency. Twenty Percent Is The Figure Usually Given. When, Momentarily, There Is A Flash Of Greater Power, It Is Termed A Hunch, Or Insight, Or Intuition.

An Atom-blaster Is A Good Weapon, But It Can Point Both Ways.

Anything You Make Forbidden Gains Sexual Attractiveness. Would You Be Particularly Interested In Women's Breasts If You Lived In A Society In Which They Were Displayed At All Times?

The World Of A.d. 2014 Will Have Few Routine Jobs That Cannot Be Done Better By Some Machine Than By Any Human Being. Mankind Will Therefore Have Become Largely A Race Of Machine Tenders.

This Idea [standardized Time Zones] Was First Advanced And Fought For By Sandford Fleming Of Canada And Charles F. Dowd Of The United States. I Mention Them Chiefly Because Like So Many Benefactors Of Mankind They Have Been Rewarded By Total Obscurity.

Tens Of Millions Of Americans Who Neither Know Or Understand The Actual Arguments For, Or Even Against, Evolution, March In The Army Of The Night With Their Bibles Held High

You Can't Assert An Answer Just Because It's Not Something Else.

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