You are a practical man, Elijah. You do not moon romantically over Earth's past, despite your healthy interest in it. Nor do you stubbornly embrace the City culture of Earth's present day. We felt tha...
Yet there was this to be said for unfavorable relationships in the wealth-distribution equation. It meant the existence of a leisure class and the development of an attractive way of life which, at it...
To a thoughtful biographer, [Ebling Mis's house] was the symbolization of a retreat from a non-academic reality, a society columnist gushed silkily at its frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless...
There is no Master but the Master, he said, and QT-1 is his prophet.
The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect--but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.
The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one...
The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise.
The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth.
The Sun burned down in a warm contrasting world of white and black, of white Sun against black sky and white rolling ground mottled with black shadow. The bright sweet smell of the Sun on every expose...
Tell me why the stars do shine,Tell me why the ivy twines,Tell me what makes skies so blue,And I'll tell you why I love you.Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Saying something is 'too bad' is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your business and not be interested anymore. It's a lot worse than 'too bad.' It...
Q. Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts concerning the future of Trantor?A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next three centuries.Q. You do not consider y...
Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustome...
Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction-only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they...
Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empi...
It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible.
Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.
In themselves, harmless. As a group, incredibly dangerous.
He supposed it was inevitable. Dip a person into one particular specialty deeply enough and long enough, and he would automatically begin to assume that specialists in all other fields were magicians,...
Every man's position on Earth is restricted to the distance he can walk.'-- The Last Trump