Issac Asimov

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The First Law of Robotics

A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. The Zeroth Law of Robotics

If I am right, then religious fundamentalists will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If THEY are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written

It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to unlearn

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.

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

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world

Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

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.

Well, I can type all day without getting tired. In response to a question as to which he preferred, women or writing

In 1936, I first wrote science fiction. It was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel...which died. I remember one sentence, Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

That we have come as far as we have in forty years the 1930s to the 1970s is hopeful, though I believe it is more through the fact that Hitler's excesses made racism poisonous to any humane individual than through our own virtue. That we have much farther to go is incontestable.

The trouble is that racial stereotypes, unfavourable to everyone but white men of northwest European extraction, were completely accepted, and indeed, scarcely noted in those days of only forty years ago the 1930s (except perhaps by the members of the groups victimized thereby).

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who 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.

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.

Then Priss arrived, dragging a volume of colorlessness in with him, a drabness that was unaffected by the noise and the absolute splendor (no other word would describe it - or else it was the two martinis glowing inside me) that filled the room

To insult someone we call him bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, human might be the greater insult.

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

I sit here and think, with more than a little astonishment, that I have been writing and publishing Science Fiction now for just three-eighths of a century. This isn't bad for someone who only admits to being in his late youth- or a little over thirty, if pinned down.