Isaac Asimov

“Then why did you run? A man who runs needs no other accusation.”

“Is that so? Really?” cried Steen. “Well, I would run out of a burning building even if I had not set the fire myself.”

Nonsense. You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

“That’s an amusing thought, if you’ll consider it.”

“Do you find everything amusing?”

“Why not? As an attitude toward life, it’s an amusing one. It’s the only adjective that will fit. Observe the universe, young man. If you can’t force amusement out of it, you might as well cut your throat, since there’s damn little good in it.”

Truth is a discredited commodity among diplomats.

Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.

Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

“Logically, developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature.”

Baley interrupted. “You mean you kill them if they don’t—”

“If they don’t measure up. Quite painlessly, I assure you. The notion shocks you, just as the Earthman’s uncontrolled breeding shocks us.”

“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.

Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

I tell you I know the type of people that become Medievalists. They’re soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.