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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.

-Isaac Asimov

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The Bible Contains Legendary,

Isaac Asimov

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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.

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

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.

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The Day You Stop Learning Is The Day You Begin Decaying.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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I Never Considered Myself A Patriot. I Like To Think I Recognize Only Humanity As My Nation.

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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.

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

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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

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

Characteristics

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

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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.

One Might Accept Death Reasoningly, With Every Aspect Of The Conscious Mind, But The Body Was A Brute Beast That Knew Nothing Of Reason.

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Happiness Is Doing It Rotten Your Own Way.

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However Much The Creationist Leaders Might Hammer Away At Their Scientific And Philosophical Points, They Would Be Helpless And A Laughing-stock If That Were All They Had. It Is Religion That Recruits Their Squadrons. Tens Of Millions Of Americans, Who Neither Know Nor Understand The Actual Arguments For - Of Even Against - Evolution, March In The Army Of The Night, Their Bibles Held High. And They Are A Strong And Frightening Force, Impervious To, And Immunized Against, The Feeble Lance Of Mere Reason.

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

Economics Is On The Side Of Humanity Now.

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

No One Suggests That Writing About Science Will Turn The Entire World Into A Model Of Judgment And Creative Thought. It Will Be Enough If They Spread The Knowledge As Widely As Possible.

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.

If I Had Felt Then As I Feel Now, Or As I Felt A Few Years After I Had Married Her, Nothing Could Possibly Have Persuaded Me To Marry A Woman Who Smoked. Dates, Yes. Sexual Adventures, Yes. But To Pin Myself Permanently Inside Closed Quarters With A Smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty Wouldn't Count, Sweetness Wouldn't Count, Suitability In Every Other Respect Wouldn't Count.

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

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

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

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.

Science Is Uncertain. Theories Are Subject To Revision; Observations Are Open To A Variety Of Interpretations, And Scientists Quarrel Amongst Themselves. This Is Disillusioning For Those Untrained In The Scientific Method, Who Thus Turn To The Rigid Certainty Of The Bible Instead. There Is Something Comfortable About A View That Allows For No Deviation And That Spares You The Painful Necessity Of Having To Think.

There Is No Merit To Discipline Under Ideal Circumstances. I Must Have It In The Face Of Death Or It Is Worthless.

Considering What Human Beings Do And Have Done To Human Beings (and To Other Living Things As Well) ... I Can Never Imagine What The Devil People Think Computers Can Add To The Horrors.

When People Thought The Earth Was Flat, They Were Wrong. When People Thought The Earth Was Spherical, They Were Wrong. But If You Think That Thinking The Earth Is Spherical Is Just As Wrong As Thinking The Earth Is Flat, Then Your View Is Wronger Than Both Of Them Put Together.

Theories Are Not So Much Wrong As Incomplete

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.

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.

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's The Writing That Teaches You.

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

Look At Yourself

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.

Fertility Is Hereditary. If Your Parents Didn't Have Any Children, Neither Will You. I Do Not Fear Computers. I Fear The Lack Of Them.

During The Century After Newton, It Was Still Possible For A Man Of Unusual Attainments To Master All Fields Of Scientific Knowledge. But By 1800, This Had Become Entirely Impracticable.

Words Are A Pretty Fuzzy Substitute For Mathematical Equations.

Mathematical Equations

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

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

The Dangers That Face The World Can, Every One Of Them, Be Traced Back To Science. The Salvations That May Save The World Will, Every One Of Them, Be Traced Back To Science.

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.

People Are Entirely Too Disbelieving Of Coincidence.

Night Will Always Be A Time Of Fear And Insecurity, And The Heart Will Sink With The Sun.

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

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

Although We Will Hate And Fight The Machines, We Will Be Supplanted Anyway, And Rightly So, For The Intelligent Machines To Which We Will Give Birth May, Better Than We, Carry On The Striving Toward The Goal Of Understanding And Using The Universe, Climbing To Heights We Ourselves Could Never Aspire To.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Education Isn't Something You Can Finish

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.

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."

All Evil Is Good Become Cancerous.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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."

The Appearance Of Strength Is All About You. It Would Seem To Last Forever. However... The Rotten Tree-trunk, Until The Very Moment When The Storm-blast Breaks It In Two, Has All The Appearance Of Might It Ever Had. The Storm-blast Whistles Through The Branches Of The Empire Even Now. Listen... And You Will Hear The Creaking.

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

It Is Almost Impossible To Think Of Something No One Has Thought Of Before, But It Is Always Possible To Add Different Frills.

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.

All Roads Lead To Trantor, Says The Old Proverb, And That Is Where All Stars End.

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.

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

Dreams May Be Impossible, Yet Still Be Dreamed.

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

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

There Is As Yet Insufficient Data For A Meaningful Answer.

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.

Computerization Eliminates The Middleman

The Facts, Gentlemen, And Nothing But The Facts, For Careful Eyes Are Narrowly Watching.

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.

We Are Reaching The Stage Where The Problems We Must Solve Are Going To Become Insoluble Without Computers. I Do Not Fear Computers, I Fear The Lack Of Them.

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.

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

[o]ur Statesmen, Our Businessmen, Our Everyman Must Take On A Science Fictional Way Of Thinking.

Inevitable Change

A Neat And Orderly Laboratory Is Unlikely. It Is, After All, So Much A Place Of False Starts And Multiple Attempts.

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.

Of Course There Are Worlds. Millions Of Them! Every Star You See Has Worlds, And Most Of Those You Don't See.

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