Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov doesn’t romanticize change; he weaponizes it. The opening cadence - “change, continuing change, inevitable change” - reads like a drumbeat meant to deny the listener any comforting fantasy of stability. It’s not just that society evolves; it’s that the old habit of treating the present as a reliable baseline has become intellectually unserious. Coming from a scientist and a major popularizer of futurism, the line carries the cool authority of someone trained to think in systems, trends, and second-order effects.

The intent is almost managerial: stop making decisions as if the future is a footnote. But the subtext is sharper. Asimov is calling out a moral and political failure of imagination - a refusal to do the hard work of forecasting consequences. “No sensible decision” is a quiet insult: if you’re governing, building, teaching, investing, or legislating without modeling what comes next, you’re not prudent; you’re negligent.

Context matters. Asimov wrote and spoke in a 20th century defined by acceleration: nuclear technology, spaceflight, computing, mass media, Cold War brinkmanship. In that world, yesterday’s common sense could become tomorrow’s catastrophe. The quote also hints at his deeper theme across essays and fiction: humans lag behind their own tools. Change isn’t merely external; it outpaces institutions, ethics, and psychology.

What makes the line work is its reframing of realism. Realism isn’t fidelity to “the world as it is.” It’s the discipline of treating the future as part of the present - because decisions are time machines with paperwork.