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What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Isaac Asimov

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Isaac Asimov
Age: 72 †
Born: 1920
Born: January 2
Died: 1992
Died: April 6
Author
Autobiographer
Biochemist
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Science Writer
Scientist
Isaak Osimov
Paul French
Asimov
Isaak Ozimov
Pain
Laughter
Jobs
Created
Without
Tears
Affecting
Writing
Reader
Remorse
Mind
Cutting
Phrase
Make
Effects
Phrases
Joy
Mercy
Lasts
Effect

More quotes by Isaac Asimov

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The great secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all
Isaac Asimov
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I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.
Isaac Asimov
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The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.
Isaac Asimov
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I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death
Isaac Asimov
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To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.
Isaac Asimov
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There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.
Isaac Asimov
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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
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The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.
Isaac Asimov
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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.
Isaac Asimov
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When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.
Isaac Asimov
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The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.
Isaac Asimov
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Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.
Isaac Asimov
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The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern knowledge is that it is wrong.
Isaac Asimov
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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 Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.
Isaac Asimov
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The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.
Isaac Asimov
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I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing Give My Regards to Broadway.
Isaac Asimov
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I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.
Isaac Asimov
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The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
Isaac Asimov
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I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide?
Isaac Asimov
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Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.
Isaac Asimov