Taha

“Campbell urged me to make my ideas as to the robot safeguards explicit rather than implicit, and I did this in my fourth robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. In that issue, on page 100, in the first column, about one-third of the way down (I just happen to remember) one of my characters says to another, “Now, look, let’s start with the Three Fundamental Rules of Robotics.” This, as it turned out, was the very first known use of the word “robotics” in print, a word that is the now-accepted and widely used term for the science and technology of the construction, maintenance, and use of robots. The Oxford English Dictionary, in the 3rd Supplementary Volume, gives me credit for the invention of the word. I did not know I was inventing the word, of course. In my youthful innocence, I thought that was the word and hadn’t the faintest notion it had never been used before.”
― Isaac Asimov, Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

“And now there came a struggle between John Campbell and myself. John could not help but feel that people of northwest European descent (like himself) were in the fore-front of human civilization and that all other people lagged behind. Expanding this view to a galactic scale, he viewed Earthmen as the “northwest Europeans” of the galaxy. He did not like to see Earthmen lose out to aliens, or to have Earthmen pictured as in any way inferior. Even if Earthmen were behind technologically, they should win anyway because they invariably were smarter, or braver, or had a superior sense of humor, or something. I, however, was not of northwest European stock, and, as a matter of fact (this was 1940, remember, and the Nazis were in the process of wiping out the European Jews), I was no great admirer of them. I felt that Earthmen, if they symbolized these northwest Europeans according to the Campbellian outlook, might well prove inferior in many vital ways to other civilized races; that Earthmen might lose out to the aliens; that they might even deserve to lose out. However, John Campbell won out. He was a charismatic and overwhelming person, and I was barely twenty years old, very much in awe of him, and very anxious to sell stories to him. So I gave in, adjusted the story to suit his prejudices and have been ashamed of that ever since.”
― Isaac Asimov, Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

“All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“There was something wrong about thse people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun