Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

War’s cleanest lie is that its casualties can be counted. Asimov’s line punctures that bookkeeping with a scientist’s cold precision: violence doesn’t stop at biology. The sentence is built like a lab note - spare, controlled, almost obvious at first glance - and that’s the trick. By narrowing in on “not only,” he frames the familiar horror (the living killed) as the smaller part of the equation, then swings the reader toward the larger, harder-to-measure damage.

The subtext is about systems, not sentiment. Wars don’t just end lives; they erase the infrastructure that lets a society remember itself. They burn archives, flatten cemeteries, silence languages, shatter family lines, and turn inheritance into rubble. The dead “die again” when their stories are lost or rewritten, when the places that anchored them are demolished, when the survivors are too traumatized or displaced to carry memory forward. That’s why the phrase lands: it expands death from an event to a process, with war as the mechanism of ongoing deletion.

Asimov, a scientist and an immigrant who lived under the long shadow of 20th-century total war, writes from a century obsessed with technology’s ability to scale destruction. In that context, the quote reads like an ethical footnote to modernity: when industrial conflict turns people into statistics, it also turns culture into collateral. The line’s power is its refusal to be poetic; it sounds like a correction, the kind that makes a whole narrative suddenly look dishonest.