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Humans Quotes by Isaac Asimov

40 Humans quotes by Isaac Asimov

All Humans quotes Isaac Asimov’s page

Isaac Asimov notes that robots must obey humans unless an order breaks the First Law of robotics. He says the human mind works at low efficiency, only flashing a stronger power in brief moments called hunches. He warns that too many people can crush democracy and human dignity, because crowding makes fairness hard.

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Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.” -I did nothing for you.” -You loved me and your love made…

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A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

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If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.

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It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

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If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.

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It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

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[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.

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A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

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Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

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Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are…

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A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. [The…

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The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step,…

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If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense,…

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I wish that I could say I was optimistic about the human race. I love us all, but we are so stupid…

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We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects...and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.

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All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the…

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Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the…

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Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the…

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In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate…

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It is quite clear that as long as the nations of the world spend most of their energy, money, and emotional strength…

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“Surely, if we take on thinking partners––or, at the least, thinking servants––in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with…

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Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be…

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You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the…

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With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely,…

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It's humbling to think that all animals, including human beings, are parasites of the plant world.

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The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

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... you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.

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Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete…

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Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned…

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Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people…

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In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite…

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I want to be a human being, nothing more and nothing less. ... I don't suppose we can ever stop hating each…

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The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human…

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I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification...It's these respectable people here…

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The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater…

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The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is…

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Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never…

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In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines…

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...democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people…

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The Three Laws of Robotics: 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to…

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More by Isaac Asimov

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…

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know-and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use…

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

“Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!”

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.

It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the…

“It might seem to you, Peter, that a truck driver, one step above an ape in your view, can't remember. But truck drivers can…

When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it,…

“You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is…

“temperatura constante de mais ou menos 21 graus”

“Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn't matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being…

“if people believe this, they would act on that belief. Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted”

I do not use airplanes. They strike me as unsporting. You can have an automobile accident-and survive. You can be on a sinking ship-and…

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance implies only ignorance that may someday be…

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. [The Second Law…