Isaac Asimov Quotes

It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.

The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.

I think threat of change is pretty potent. In humans, blood pressure doesn't go up when people get laid off: it goes up when they first hear rumors that layoffs are coming at the end of the month.

The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

I think that fear comes about when there's things in the world that we want to change, things we're scared or angry about, and we can't change them, and so we become fearful; we develop anxiety.

We live in a pretty bleak time. I feel that in the air. Everything is uncertain. Everything feels like its on the precipice of some major transformation, whether we like it or not.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

I don't have control over what's on screen, and that's terrifying.

The world that we all knew before, could wake up in feeling safe... now it seems that everything has been turned upside down.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

I think the story of 'Alice in Wonderland' in a way is a reminder that life is frightening, it can shift on you at any moment.

We are going through a terrible crisis. We do not know exactly what is going to happen, but in our hearts the pendulum of the seismograph is already swinging.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

When I first walked into Uber, it was very difficult because people were unsure about what was going to happen - there was a real sense of powerlessness.

It's inevitable that you feel scared when you don't have control of a situation.

The unknown is always scary.

Ambiguity is our permanent state, isn't it? We don't like it being so. Most of us crave order and routine, and yet yawning before us is our future, as frightening as it is thrilling.

Change is all about motion, motion is all about uncertainty and we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.

There is no security in following the call to adventure.

What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.