Psychohistory was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, S...
Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those...
Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.
The Earth, he said, is a large and very complex lifeboat. We still do not know what can or can't be done with a proper distribution of resources and it is notorious that to this very day we have not r...
The Library was outmoded and archaic—it had been so even in Ebling Mis's time—but that was all to the good. Pelorat always rubbed his hands with excitement when he thought of an old and outmoded Libra...
The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.
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...
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 gener...
The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise.
The robot said, 'I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not...
The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.
The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.
The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives—past and present and to come—forms a tapestry that has been in exist...
There is no Master but the Master, he said, and QT-1 is his prophet.
Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighbo...
To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
You’re surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can’t stand up under it. In the sleep period, you’re free.
All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. E...
People sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.
The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.
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