- Someday they'll come and find me slumped over that electric typewriter with my nose in the keys.
- It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
- Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.
- I type 90 words per minute on the typewriter; I type 100 words per minute on the word processor. But, of course, I don't keep that up indefinitely--every once in a while I do have to think a few seconds.
- When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."
- Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
- Science-fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
- 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.
- Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough?
- I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
- If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
- Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
- Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
- Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
- ["The Three Laws of Robotics", published 1950] One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
- I write for the same reason I breathe--because if I didn't, I would die.
- If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
- Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.
- The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
- There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
- Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
- To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.
- The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" [I found it!] but "That's funny . . . "
- I don't have a modest bone in my body.
- To all my gentle readers who have treated me with love for over 30 years, I must say farewell. It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys, but that's not the way it worked out. I have had a long and happy life and I have no complaints about the ending, thereof, and so farewell--farewell.
- There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
- WASPS are known for their sangfroid and coolness under pressure. For that reason, the following story should be read with a British Accent....
- You can't argue with a cop intent on fulfilling his ticketing quota.
- It is not only the living who are killed in Wars.
- Above the Entrance to the Temple of Science it is written: "You must have Faith".
- [Caves of Steel, Spacer HQ] If you don't know where it is, you have no business there...
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