The Robots of Dawn (Robot #3)

by Isaac Asimov

Could it be morning—or any other time of day—in space? Clearly, it couldn’t. He thought awhile and decided he would define morning as the time after waking, and he would define breakfast as the meal eaten after waking, and abandon specific timekeeping as objectively unimportant.

History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living.

“You expect a space war—like a hyperwave shoot-’em-up.” “No, I doubt that that would be necessary. A civilization that is expanding through space will not need our few worlds and will probably be too intellectually advanced to feel the need to batter its way into hegemony here. If, however, we are surrounded by a more lively, a more vibrant civilization, we will wither away by the mere force of the comparison; we will die of the realization of what we have become and of the potential we have wasted. Of course, we might substitute other expansions—an expansion of scientific understanding or of cultural vigor, for instance. I fear, however, that these expansions are not separable. To fade in one is to fade in all. Certainly, we are fading in all. We live too long. We are too comfortable.”

“I can choose not to do my duty, but I do not choose to—and that is sometimes the stronger compulsion, Giskard.”

if a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

Familiarity was quickly breeding indifference.

you remind me how easy it is to philosophize over the sorrows of others.”

“By finding it impossible to eliminate a possibility, a beginning is made at establishing one.”

On the world of Pallas, facial hair is common, but it is the practice there to indulge in parti-colored dying. Each individual hair is separately dyed to produce some sort of mixture. —Now, that’s foolish. It doesn’t last, the colors change with time, and it looks terrible. But even so, it’s better than facial baldness in some ways. Nothing is less attractive than a facial desert. —That’s my own phrase. I use it in my personal talks with potential clients and it’s very effective. Females can get by with no facial hair because they make up for it in other ways.

Here were the same long cold bare corridors, the same lowest common denominator of design and decoration, with every light source designed so as to irritate as few people as possible and to please just as few.

“Does the general public know?” “Probably not. The general public has its own priorities and is more interested in the next meal, the next hyperwave show, the next space-soccer contest than in the next century and the next millennium. Still, the general public will be as glad to accept my plans, as are the intellectually minded who already know. Those who object will not be numerous enough to matter.”

“Are you well, sir?” asked Giskard. It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no worse than the questions asked by human beings, sometimes with wild inappropriateness, out of the programming of etiquette.

Nothing like this had happened to him since he was an infant and he was suddenly sorry for the babies for whom everything was done and who were not sufficiently conscious of it to enjoy it.

no machine can be of secret design if the machine itself is available for sufficiently intense study.”

If you benefit by learning, is it not only right and fair that you should teach in your turn?