A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism IS a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.

The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life.

I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.