I refused to make any changes. I said to them, haughtily, “It isn’t written in the stars that I must make a… — Isaac Asimov
I refused to make any changes.
I said to them, haughtily, “It isn’t written in the stars that I must make a million dollars, but it is written in the stars that I must be true to my principles.”
So they fired me. They had someone else do the changes, and on June 26, 1978, I made them remove my name from the book. The project was a fiasco from beginning to end.
What does one do in a case like this? One is helpless in the face of cowardly publishers, pliant school boards, and fanatical ignoramuses. All I can do is write essays denouncing creationism with its believe in Adam, Eve, a talking serpent, and a worldwide Flood, all in a six- to ten-thousand-year-old universe, and in a supernatural creation of all the species of life so that they were different from the start.
Some of my essays appeared in as august an organ as The New York Times Magazine and that roused the anger of many Fundamentalists—an anger I am happy and proud to inspire.
p. 307Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.
Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?
p. 93
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
p. 421
Publishers, with their usual bravery, dumbed down their books in order to make money at the expense of leaving American children undereducated or, worse, miseducated.
p. 306
