01c. 1956 ADMarried life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
02c. 1956 ADThere never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
03c. 1956 ADSo, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
04c. 1956 ADCivilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
05c. 1956 ADThe Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
06c. 1956 ADIt seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
07c. 1956 ADIn all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
09c. 1956 ADA person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
10c. 1956 ADAny system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
11c. 1956 ADHumanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
12c. 1956 ADI believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
13c. 1956 ADIt's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
14c. 1956 AD[What’s exciting is] the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
15c. 1956 ADYou are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
16c. 1956 ADMany years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?""From you, Pappa", I said."From me? I don't know any of this"."You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble."- Isaac Asimov (Isaak Yudovich Ozimov). It's been a good life.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
17c. 1956 ADJohn 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.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
18c. 1956 ADIt was a long time since he'd done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. He was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
20c. 1956 ADIt is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
22c. 1956 ADWell, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, & a thirteenth...Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
24c. 1956 ADThe young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture 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.The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said Socrates, 'it is because I alone know that I know nothing.' The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.Alas, none of this was new to me. (There is very little that is new to me; I wish my correspondents would realize this.) This particular theme was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. He also told me that all theories are proven wrong in time.My answer to him was, 'John, 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.Isaac Asimov / quote ↗
