Michael > Michael's Quotes

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“Remember, the enemy's gate is down.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card

“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.”
― Isaac Asimov

“What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.”
― Isaac Asimov

“But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”
― Isaac Asimov

“We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
― Isaac Asimov

“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer--by demonstration--would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light--”
― Isaac Asimov, Robot Dreams

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile ”
― Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.”
― Arthur C Clarke

“I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.”
― Arthur C. Clarke