The Gods Themselves

by Isaac Asimov

Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made.

“He believes his own fantasy and fights for it with a diseased fury. He’s a pygmy with only one talent, the ability to convince others he’s a giant.”

He started blindly but within a month he had that feeling that every scientist recognizes—the endless click-click as unexpected pieces fall into place, as annoying anomalies become anomalous no more—It was the feel of Truth.

“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not encourage cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines.

It’s really disheartening, the universal stupidity. I think that I wouldn’t grieve at mankind’s suicide through sheer evilness of heart, or through mere recklessness. There’s something so damned undignified at going to destruction through sheer thickheaded stupidity. What’s the use of being men if that’s how you have to die.”

“Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.’ I’m no god and I’ll contend no longer.

It was wonderful to have it explained, Dua thought. What she was told, she really knew; but she didn’t know the proper words; the long science-words that Odeen knew. And it made sharper and more meaningful everything that happened.

The curiosity is useful, the fear useless.

If anything I do were to lift the specter of doom from mankind, either by showing that it does not exist or that it does exist and must be removed, I would be pleased.”

they want it enough to refuse to believe they can’t have it.” “But why should they want it, if it means death?” “All they have to do is refuse to believe it means death. The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.

At the age of twenty-five I was still such a child that I had to amuse myself by insulting a fool for no reason other than that he was a fool. Since his folly was not his fault, I was the greater fool to do it.

However, only a few people have hurt me, and if I hurt everyone in return that is unconscionable usury.

The good name of science is more important than Hallam either way.” “I disapprove of that in principle,” said Denison, warmly. “Science must take what blows it deserves.”

In any case, there are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass. We’ve passed this one safely, I think, and we’ll worry about the others as they come and as they can be foreseen.

To mankind, and the hope that the war against folly may someday be won after all.