Isaac Asimov Quotes - Page 2

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

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.

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.

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

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.

If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

Sólo hay una guerra que puede permitirse el ser humano: la guerra contra su extinción.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

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

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time."
"Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

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

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.

All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.

It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

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

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers.

How to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education.
If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war that war itself?