Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.
But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldo...
An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without...
A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. And you, Lee, have got to worry even if you must kill yourself to invent something to worry about.
You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.
If we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will...
You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.
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...
What was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb; and once left, it could not be re-entered.
We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.
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...
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...
The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.
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 laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that i...
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...
Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.
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...
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...