Isaac Asimov on Philosophy

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

"It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable."

"Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can't resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly."

"I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless."

"Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere."

"I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong."

"Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless."

"I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending."

"No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically."

"There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't."

"I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters In between two of the segments she asked me "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?" I said, "Type faster." This was widely quoted, but the "six months" was changed to "six minutes," which bothered me. It's "six months."

"How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?"

"Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent"