Isaac Asimov quotes

Any dogma, primarily based 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.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!

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

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Human beings are very conservative in some ways and virtually never change numerical conventions once they grow used to them. They even come to mistake them for laws of nature.

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 its rules that hold society together and bind it into a whole. Is it such a light thing to disregard the rules for trivial reasons?

Superstition always directs action in the absence of knowledge.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.

Anyone who displays a capacity for double-dealing must forever be suspected of being capable of displaying it again.

The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them.

The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

A person who expects the completely sophisticated and who guards against it is quite apt never to think of the primitive.

The earliest histories were medleys of self-serving heroisms and mini-dramas that were meant as morality plays and were not to be taken literally.

A particular event may be infinitesimally probable, but the probability is always greater than zero.

Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true.

The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.