Isaac Asimov Quotes

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Every church pretends to have found the exact truth. This is the end of progress. Why pursue that which you have? Why investigate when you know? Every creed is a rock in running water: humanity sweeps by it. Every creed cries to the universe, "Halt!" A creed is the ignorant Past bullying the enlightened Present. The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. They demand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, are of no value to them. They demand the complete circle... the entire structure.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

Religious scholars, marginalized by modernization, seek to assert their own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

It's simple-minded people like that, the ones that are afraid of change, they use everything in their power to defend what they stand up for instead of trying to listen and understand what's going on.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Nor bigots who but one way see, through blinkers of authority.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

It is in the uncomprisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma that the danger lies.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Those who cling to the past won't give up without a fight.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

We know the clerical party; it is an old party. This it is which has found for the truth those two marvelous supporters, ignorance and error. This it is which forbids to science and genius the going beyond the Missal and which wishes to cloister thought in dogmas.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.