It is a mistake, he said, to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public...
The fact of the matter is that young men lack skill and experience and are very likely to approach a girl as though she were a sack of wheat. It is the old man—suave, debonair, maturely charming—who k...
No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.
Innumerable surveys have made it quite clear that when a respectable elderly man makes up to a giggling young lady, it is not the giggling young lady so accosted that is offended by the action, but ra...
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one. (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last on...
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.
We must not be taken in by the myth of youth, the unending propaganda to the effect that young men are younger than old men; that they are better looking; that they are slimmer, stronger and more athl...
In fact, once when I imprinted on a young lady’s lips a chaste and fatherly kiss for about five minutes, I stopped and said, sorrowfully, Wouldn’t you rather be kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy?She...
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 scienti...
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will d...
You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?Notoriously not. Pioneers never are.
The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
For a wise man, I have been told, once said, ‘Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.’ But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem.
What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be para...
The thanks of a weak one are but of little value, he muttered, but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way- and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite uns...
Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without...
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.