Isaac Asimov Quotes

There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind under which we must acquiesce. A forty years' experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take. If too hard pushed, they balk, and the machine retrogrades.

The rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change is one of the many examples of populist revolt against expert consensus in the United States today.

When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts. But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.

When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

Things like lack of leadership and a lack of the willingness to evolve, they’re so used to keeping people within the constraints of the idea that has been the same idea for a thousand years.

As we have seen after every other [Donald] Trump controversy, this one only increased their enthusiasm for him. His supporters thought the idea of a temporary halt in Muslims coming to the U.S. was a common sense proposal in a time of great fear about terrorism.

...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there's no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot - and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.

These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

A true conservative is on the side of science.

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

It wasn't like I was some expert on the meaning of being supportive. Was it being loyal even against your better judgement? Or, like Olivia, was it making your displeasure known from the start, even when someone didn't want to hear it?

It's never a good idea to ask a man on a tight-rope how he keeps his balance: a) he would probably fall off and b) he probably doesn't know what the muscles are called in any case.

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince... the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.

Publicly criticizing people, even when I don't have the facts, is not that good of an idea.

Take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own

If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.