Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in...
Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.
We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.''For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of...
We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we hav...
Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want...
These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.
There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state.
The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)
The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end. With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they would have crushed us. It is the most p...
The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to.
The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.
The fall of Trantor, said Seldon, cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my pl...
Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science...
People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.
On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again...on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about....
Oh, hell! I can’t sleep! Neither can I! But I might as well try—as a matter of principle. Twelve hours later, sleep was still just that—a matter of principle, unattainable in practice.
Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.
Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since medieval times, it was a woman's pu...