Isaac Asimov Quotes About Science
-
A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
→ -
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.
→ -
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
→ -
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. 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. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.
→ -
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.
→ -
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
→ -
Science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why no turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, ... [being] lifted into eternal bliss ... [and] watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.
→ -
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
→ -
The law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.
→ -
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.
→ -
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.
→ -
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
→ -
Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.
→ -
We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.
→ -
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.
→ -
The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life.
→ -
Thinking is the activity I love best, and writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers. I can write up to 18 hours a day. Typing 90 words a minute, I've done better than 50 pages a day. Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up-well, maybe once.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
→ -
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.
→ -
Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Jules Verne Novelist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Harlan Ellison Writer -
H. G. Wells Writer -
Clifford D. Simak Writer -
Frank Herbert Author -
Philip K. Dick Novelist -
Stanislaw Lem Writer -
Arthur C. Clarke Film writer -
William Gibson Novelist -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
Robert A. Heinlein Science writer -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Douglas Adams Writer -
Frederik Pohl Writer -
Poul Anderson Author -
Ray Bradbury Writer -
Ursula K. Le Guin Author -
Robert Silverberg Author