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Surely, If We Take On Thinking Partners - Or, At The Least, Thinking Servants - In The Form Of Machines, We Will Be More Comfortable With Them, And Will Relate To Them More Easily, If They Are Shaped Like Humans. It Will Be Easier To Be Friends With Human-shaped Robots Than With Specialized Machines Of Unrecognizable Shape. And I Sometimes Think That, In The Desperate Straits Of Humanity Today, We Would Be Grateful To Have Nonhuman Friends, Even If They Are Only The Friends We Build Ourselves.

-Isaac Asimov

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Surely, If We Take

Isaac Asimov

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Surely, If We Take On Thinking Partners - Or, At The Least, Thinking Servants - In The Form Of Machines, We Will Be More Comfortable With Them, And Will Relate To Them More Easily, If They Are Shaped Like Humans. It Will Be Easier To Be Friends With Human-shaped Robots Than With Specialized Machines Of Unrecognizable Shape. And I Sometimes Think That, In The Desperate Straits Of Humanity Today, We Would Be Grateful To Have Nonhuman Friends, Even If They Are Only The Friends We Build Ourselves.

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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.

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Any Planet Is 'earth' To Those That Live On It.

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.

Scientific Apparatus Offers A Window To Knowledge, But As They Grow More Elaborate, Scientists Spend Ever More Time Washing The Windows.

The Greatest Weapons In The Conquest Of Knowledge Are An Understanding Mind And The Inexorable Curiosity That Drives It On.

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?"

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

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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.

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Law Of Attraction

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

Characteristics

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Inevitable Change

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

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Mathematical Equations

Experimentation Is The Least Arrogant Method Of Gaining Knowledge. The Experimenter Humbly Asks A Question Of Nature.

Maybe Happiness Is This: Not Feeling Like You Should Be Elsewhere, Doing Something Else, Being Someone Else.

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The Intelligent Man Is Never Bored.

It's Your Fiction That Interests Me. Your Studies Of The Interplay Of Human Motives And Emotion.

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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.

Every Period Of Human Development Has Had Its Own Particular Type Of Human Conflict---its Own Variety Of Problem That, Apparently, Could Be Settled Only By Force. And Each Time, Frustratingly Enough, Force Never Really Settled The Problem. Instead, It Persisted Through A Series Of Conflicts, Then Vanished Of Itself---what's The Expression---ah, Yes, 'not With A Bang, But A Whimper,' As The Economic And Social Environment Changed. And Then, New Problems, And A New Series Of Wars.

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

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

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

The True Delight Is In The Finding Out Rather Than In The Knowing.

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

People Who Think They Know Everything Are A Great Annoyance To Those Of Us Who Do.

It Was Childish To Feel Disappointed, But Childishness Comes Almost As Naturally To A Man As To A Child.

The Law Of Conservation Of Energy Tells Us We Can't Get Something For Nothing, But We Refuse To Believe It.

Dreams May Be Impossible, Yet Still Be Dreamed.

The Young Specialist In English Lit, ...lectured Me Severely On The Fact That In Every Century People Have Thought They Understood The Universe At Last, And In Every Century They Were Proved To Be Wrong. It Follows That The One Thing We Can Say About Our Modern "knowledge" Is That It Is Wrong.

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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.

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The Tyranni Rule Fifty Worlds; They Are Outnumbered Hundreds To One. In Such A Position, Simple Force Is Insufficient. Devious Methods, Intrigue, Assassination Are Their Specialties. The Net They Weave Across Space Is A Wide One, And Close-meshed. I Can Well Believe That It Extends Across Five Hundred Light-years To Earth.

Happiness Is Doing It Rotten Your Own Way.

The Cure For Advanced Gullibility Is To Go To Sleep And Consider Matters Again The Next Day.

Any Book Worth Banning Is A Book Worth Reading.

To Those Who Are Trained In Science, Creationism Seems A Bad Dream, A Sudden Coming Back To Life Of A Nightmare, A Renewed March Of An Army Of The Night Risen To Challenge Free Thought And Enlightenment.

When I Die I Won't Go To Heaven Or Hell; There Will Just Be Nothingness.

The Whole Business Is The Crudest Sort Of Stratagem, Since We Have No Way Of Foreseeing It To The End. It Is A Mere Paying Out Of Rope On The Chance That Somewhere Along The Length Of It Will Be A Noose.

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.

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.

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

Science Is A Set Of Rules To Keep Us From Telling Lies To Each Other. All Scientists Really Have Is A Reputation For Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

Computerization Eliminates The Middleman

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

There Are Many Aspects Of The Universe That Still Cannot Be Explained Satisfactorily By Science; But Ignorance Implies Only Ignorance That May Someday Be Conquered. To Surrender To Ignorance And Call It God Has Always Been Premature, And It Remains Premature Today.

In A Properly Automated And Educated World, Then, Machines May Prove To Be The True Humanizing Influence. It May Be That Machines Will Do The Work That Makes Life Possible And That Human Beings Will Do All The Other Things That Make Life Pleasant And Worthwhile

Arthur Clarke Says That I Am First In Science And Second In Science Fiction In Accordance With An Agreement We Have Made. I Say He Is First In Science Fiction And Second In Science.

I Am All For Cultural Diversity And Would Be Willing To See Each Recognizable Group Value Its Cultural Heritage. I Am A New York Patriot, For Instance, And If I Lived In Los Angeles, I Would Love To Get Together With Other New York Expatriates And Sing "give My Regards To Broadway".

The First Law Of Dietetics Seems To Be: If It Tastes Good, It's Bad For You.

I Don't Expect To Live Forever, Nor Do I Repine Over That, But I Am Weak Enough To Want To Be Remembered Forever. - Yet How Few Of Those Who Have Lived, Even Of Those Who Have Accomplished Far More Than I Have, Linger On In World Memory For Even A Single Century After Death

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.

There Is No Master But The Master,” He Said, “and Qt-1 Is His Prophet.

What Lasts In The Reader's Mind Is Not The Phrase But The Effect The Phrase Created: Laughter, Tears, Pain, Joy. If The Phrase Is Not Affecting The Reader, What's It Doing There? Make It Do Its Job Or Cut It Without Mercy Or Remorse.

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.

It Is Well-known That The Friend Of A Conqueror Is But The Last Victim.

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.

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

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.

Life Is A Journey, But Don't Worry, You'll Find A Parking Spot At The End.

Democracy Cannot Survive Overpopulation.

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.

A Robot Must Protect Its Own Existence As Long As Such Protection Does Not Conflict With The First Or Second Laws.

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

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.

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."

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

It Took Me Thirty-six Years; And, In Some Fifty Stories, Ranging In Length From Short-shorts To Novels, I Think I Must Have Touched, In One Way Or Another, On Every Aspect Of Computers And Computerization. And (mark This!) I Did It Without Ever Knowing Anything At All About Computers In Any Real Sense. To This Day, I Don't. I Am Totally Inept With Machinery... On My Typewriter I Turn Out Books At The Contemptible Rate Of One A Month

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.

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

Inanimate Objects

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

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

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

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

People Are Entirely Too Disbelieving Of Coincidence.

If You Ask For Too Much, You Lose Even That Which You Have.

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

Not Good Enough

The Bible Contains Legendary, Historical, And Ethical Contents. It Is Quite Possible To Consider Them Separately, And One Doesn't Have To Accept The Legends In Order To Get The Ethics. Fundamentalists Make A Grave Mistake To Insist On The Letter Of The Writings, Because They Drive Away Many Who Can't Swallow The Adam-and-eve Bit.

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.

What Would I Do If I Knew I Only Had Six Months To Live? Type Faster.

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.

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

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.

Never Let Your Sense Of Morals Get In The Way Of Doing What's Right.

There Is Nothing So Eternally Adhesive As The Memory Of Power.

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

True Literacy Is Becoming An Arcane Art, And The Nation Is Steadily "dumbing Down."

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."

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.

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

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

How Often People Speak Of Art And Science As Though They Were Two Entirely Different Things, With No Interconnection. That Is All Wrong. The True Artist Is Quite Rational As Well As Imaginative And Knows What He Is Doing; If He Does Not, His Art Suffers. The True Scientist Is Quite Imaginative As Well As Rational, And Sometimes Leaps To Solutions Where Reason Can Follow Only Slowly; If He Does Not, His Science Suffers.

In The Presence Of Total Darkness, The Mind Finds It Absolutely Necessary To Create Light.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, For A Pin That Would Puncture Pretension!

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.

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

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...

The Bible Must Be Seen In A Cultural Context. It Didn't Just Happen. These Stories Are Retreads. But, Tell A Christian That -- No, No! What Makes It Doubly Sad Is That They Hardly Know The Book, Much Less Its Origins.

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.

It Is Precisely Because It Is Fashionable For Americans To Know No Science, Even Though They May Be Well Educated Otherwise, That They So Easily Fall Prey To Nonsense.

Meanwhile, Fears Of Universal Disaster Sank To An All Time Low Over The World.

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

Goodbye, Hari, My Love. Remember Always--all You Did For Me.” -i Did Nothing For You.” -you Loved Me And Your Love Made Me--human.

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

I Figure That If God Actually Does Exist, He Is Big Enough To Understand An Honest Difference Of Opinion.

Plate Glass... Has No Beauty Of Its Own. Ideally, You Ought Not To Be Able To See It At All, But Through It You Can See All That Is Happening Outside. That Is The Equivalent Of Writing That Is Plain And Unadorned. Ideally, In Reading Such Writing, You Are Not Even Aware That You Are Reading. Ideas And Events Seem Merely To Flow From The Mind Of The Writer Into That Of The Reader Without Any Barrier Between. I Hope That Is What Is Happening When You Read This Book

Democracy Cannot Survive Overpopulation. Human Dignity Cannot Survive It. Convenience And Decency Cannot Survive It. As You Put More And More People Into The World, The Value Of Life Not Only Declines, But It Disappears. It Doesn't Matter If Someone Dies.

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

There Are So Many Benefits To Be Derived From Space Exploration And Exploitation; Why Not Take What Seems To Me The Only Chance Of Escaping What Is Otherwise The Sure Destruction Of All That Humanity Has Struggled To Achieve For 50,000 Years?

To Bring About Destruction By Overcrowding, Mass Starvation, Anarchy, The Destruction Of Our Most Cherished Values, There Is No Need To Do Anything. We Need Only Do Nothing Except What Comes Naturally, And Breed. And How Easy It Is To Do Nothing

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.

Whenever I Have Endured Or Accomplished Some Difficult Task -- Such As Watching Television, Going Out Socially Or Sleeping -- I Always Look Forward To Rewarding Myself With The Small Pleasure Of Getting Back To My Typewriter And Writing Something.

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

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.

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.

All The Suffering That Humanity Ever Knew Can Be Traced To The One Fact That No Man In The History Of The Galaxy ... Could Really Understand One Another. Every Human Being Lived Behind An Impenetrable Wall Of Choking Mist Within Which No Other But He Existed.

Speech As Known To Us Was Unnecessary. A Fragment Of A Sentence Amounted Almost To A Long-winded Redundancy. A Gesture, A Grunt, The Curve Of A Facial Line--even A Significantly Timed Pause Yielded Informational Juice.

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.

It Is The Writer Who Might Catch The Imagination Of Young People, And Plant A Seed That Will Flower And Come To Fruition.

I Made Up My Mind Long Ago To Follow One Cardinal Rule In All My Writing — To Be Clear.

It's Humbling To Think That All Animals, Including Human Beings, Are Parasites Of The Plant World.

With Both People And Computers On The Job, Computer Error Can Be More Quickly Tracked Down And Corrected By People And, Conversely, Human Error Can Be More Quickly Corrected By Computers. What It Amounts To Is That Nothing Serious Can Happen Unless Human Error And Computer Error Take Place Simultaneously. And That Hardly Ever Happens.

I Have Never Written A Book That Didn't Teach Me Far More Than It Taught My Reader.

My Feeling Is, Quite Simply, That If There Is A God, He Has Done Such A Bad Job That He Isn't Worth Discussing.

If There Is A God

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

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.

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.

It's Just Science Fiction So It's Allowed To Be Silly, And Childish, And Stupid. It's Just Science Fiction, So It Doesn't Have To Make Sense. It's Just Science Fiction, So You Must Ask Nothing More Of It Than Loud Noises And Flashing Lights.

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.

It Is The Obvious Which Is So Difficult To See Most Of The Time. People Say 'it's As Plain As The Nose On Your Face.' But How Much Of The Nose On Your Face Can You See, Unless Someone Holds A Mirror Up To You?

The Essential Building Block Is...the True Love That Is Impossible To Define For Those Who Have Never Experienced It And Unnecessary To Define For Those Who Have.

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

I Am An Atheist, Out And Out. It Took Me A Long Time To Say It.

Humanity Has The Stars In Its Future, And That Future Is Too Important To Be Lost Under The Burden Of Juvenile Folly And Ignorant Superstition.

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 In School.

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

It Is Quite Clear That As Long As The Nations Of The World Spend Most Of Their Energy, Money, And Emotional Strength In Quarreling With Words And Weapons, A True Offensive Against The Common Problems That Threaten Human Survival Is Not Very Likely. A World Government That Can Channel Human Efforts In The Direction Of The Great Solutions Seems Desirable, Even Essential. Naturally, Such A World Government Should Be A Federal One, With Regional And Local Autonomy Safeguarded And With Cultural Diversity Promoted.

World Government

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.

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

Now Remember, Kids, The Internet Is Serious Business.

Serious Business

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

And [asimov]'ll Sign Anything, Hardbacks, Softbacks, Other People's Books, Scraps Of Paper. Inevitably Someone Handed Him A Blank Check On The Occasion When I Was There, And He Signed That Without As Much As A Waver To His Smile — Except That He Signed: 'harlan Ellison.

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.

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.

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.

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

He Had Read Much, If One Considers His Long Life; But His Contemplation Was Much More Than His Reading. He Was Wont To Say That If He Had Read As Much As Other Men He Should Have Known No More Than Other Men.

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

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