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The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

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
Since
Stratagem
Chance
Rope
Business
Paying
Ends
Length
Whole
Somewhere
Crudest
Way
Mere
Foreseeing
Along
Noose
Sort
Nooses

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A good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.
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The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.
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People think of education as something that they can finish.
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I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.
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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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Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.
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And in man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.
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Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history : the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal honor and court etiquette.
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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.
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There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream.
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If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable.
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I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
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