The Naked Sun

“Ah, the future good!” Leebig’s eyes glowed with passion and he seemed to grow less conscious of his listener and correspondingly more talkative. “A simple concept, you think. How many human beings are willing to accept a trifling inconvenience for the sake of a large future good? How long does it take to train a child that what tastes good now means a stomach-ache later, and what tastes bad now will correct the stomach-ache later? Yet you want a robot to be able to understand?”

Genes aren’t everything. Environment counts too, and environment can bend into actual psychosis where genes indicate only a potentiality for a particular psychosis.

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

There isn’t an instinct around that can’t give way to a good, persistent education. Not in human beings, where instincts are weak anyway. In fact, if you go about it right, education gets easier with each generation.

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

“Is that important?”

“Everything is important till proven otherwise.”

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.

So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.