Isaac Asimov

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.

There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

“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.

Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.

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

I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.

He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own words, he said, “Go, and sin no more!”

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.

Goodbye, friend Elijiah, and remember that, although people apply the phrase to Aurora, it is, from this point on, Earth itself that is the true World of the Dawn.

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

“How does it concern you people? It’s our problem. We’ll solve it. If not, it’s our own particular road to hell.”

“Better your own road to hell than another’s road to heaven, eh?”