Daily Digest

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

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”

“Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life. [Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”

“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”

“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”

“Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.”

“John 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 write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.”

“People think of education as something they can finish.”

“It's the writing that teaches you.”

“Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

“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.”

“He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.”

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

“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.”

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”

“A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.”

“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.”

“Science may be, and has been, misused, but the proper cure for that is not to replace science by non-science and sense by nonsense - but to replace science-misused by science well-used.”

“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”

“You feel humiliated, my young man, because thinking you understood so much so well, you suddenly find that many very apparent things were unknown to you. Thinking you were one of the Lords of the Galaxy; you suddenly find that you stand near to destruction. Naturally, you will resent the ivory tower in which you lived; the seclusion in which you were educated; the theories on which you were reared.”

“I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.”

“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow. In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead. But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning. There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

“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 paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.”

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.”

“I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.”

“If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.”

“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”

“When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”

“All evil is good become cancerous.”

“Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.”

“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”

“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.”

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'”

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

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

“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”

“I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.”

“Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.”

“It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.”

“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

“Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”

“And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.”

“All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.”