You wash your hands, don't you?Bayley's eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. Yes, he said.All right. I suppose it's a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands...
The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everyt...
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too lo...
Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.
Changelessness is decay.A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse.Changelessness is a change for the worse
I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.
Feminine intuition? Is that what you wanted the robot for? You men. Faced with a woman reaching a correct conclusion and unable to accept the fact that she is your equal or superior in intelligence, y...
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every perso...
Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.
...We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916...
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we...
How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at on...
Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; nochange. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold wh...
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.
It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.
It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.