Isaac Asimov

Your emotions are, of course, only the children of your background and are not to be condemned - merely changed.

He never created a finished product. Finished products are for decadent minds.

“When the twenty-seven independent Trading Worlds, united only by their distrust of mother planet of the Foundation, concert an assembly among themselves, and each is big with a pride grown of its smallness, hardened by its own insularity and embittered by eternal danger — there are preliminary negotiations to be overcome of a pettiness sufficiently staggering to heart-sicken the most persevering.”

The spell of power never quite releases its hold.

The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.

It is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim.

The robot has wanted Fallom all along, Janov.

Old memories - really old - are almost all in the mountain roots where it takes time to dig them out.

Now the plan was threatend by something more serious than the Mule had ever been. It was to be diverted from a renewal of Empire to something utterly different from anything in history - Galaxia. And he himself had agreed to that. But why? Was there a flaw in the plan? a basic flaw? For one flashing moment, it seemed to Trevize that this flaw did indeed exist and that he knew what it was, that he had known what it was when he made his decision - but the knowledge...if that were what it was...vanished as fast as it came, and left him with nothing.

One should cultivate an innocence, an awareness of self, and an unselfconsciousness of self which leaves one nothing to hide.

No matter how the conomy and sociology of the neighbouring sectors of the Galaxy changes, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.