Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s line reads like a warning label for the modern age: if you’re making choices using only the present tense, you’re already behind. Coming from a scientist and futurist who built entire story-worlds around unintended consequences, the intent isn’t abstract wisdom; it’s a demand for upgraded responsibility. “No sensible decision” is a deliberately hard gate. He’s not praising long-term thinking as a virtue. He’s declaring short-termism a form of irrationality.

The subtext is a critique of institutions that treat tomorrow as someone else’s problem. Politics loves the next election, business loves the next quarter, and even ordinary people are trained to see “the future” as a separate category from “real life.” Asimov collapses that comforting divide. The world “as it will be” isn’t prophecy; it’s the downstream effects of what we normalize now: energy choices that lock in climate realities, technologies that silently rewrite labor and privacy, education systems that preselect who gets to adapt.

Context matters: Asimov wrote and spoke through the Cold War, the nuclear shadow, the space race, the computer revolution. These were eras when human capability scaled faster than human caution. His phrasing captures a scientific habit of mind - models, projections, second-order effects - but it also carries moral impatience. Sensible isn’t just “smart.” It’s ethical competence in a world where the future arrives on schedule, whether you planned for it or not.