Isaac Asimov Quotes

People want security in this insecure world.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone - but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if WHAT you believed became more important than the fact THAT you believed.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.

I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

To cut off the confusion and accept an answer just because it's too scary not to have an answer is a good way to get the wrong answer.

People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, “Well, are you a Republican or an American?” The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, “I don't have a knowledge that God exists.” The atheist says, “I don't have a belief that God exists.” You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

"Once there, always there", would give you less freedom than you recently enjoyed, but more security. Security not in the sense of safety from terrorists, burglars, or pickpockets... but security in the sense of knowing where you are, who you are, on what kind of future you can count, what will happen, whether you will preserve your position in society or whether you will be degraded and humiliated - this sort of security. This sort of security for many, many people - a rising number of people - looks at the moment more attractive than more freedom.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.