Second Foundation

by Isaac Asimov

‘Oh—’ Arcadia held back her tears with an effort. Her own father didn’t even trust her. And that darned Transcriber— If that silly fool hadn’t come gooping at the window, and making her forget to turn it off. And now her father would be making long, gentle speeches about what young ladies aren’t supposed to do. There just wasn’t anything they were supposed to do, it looked like, except choke and die, maybe.

he used to say that only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true.

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication – but one which in its clumsiness and thick-numbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signalling.

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

and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.

It was the first time she realized that she was standing in front of a ticket machine. You put a high denomination bill into the clipper which sank out of sight. You pressed the button below your destination and a ticket came out together with the correct change as determined by an electronic scanning device that never made a mistake. It was a very ordinary thing and there is no cause for anyone to stand before it for five minutes.

To us, all life is a series of accidents to be met with by improvisations. To them, all life is purposive and should be met by precalculation.