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A paradox arises only out of an ambiguity that deceives either unwittingly or by design.
You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can’t always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you’ve planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.”
The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to.”
Being feared is nothing. Being despised, even, can be lived with. But being laughed at—that’s fatal.
Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”
movements never completely die, no matter how ridiculous their tenets may seem to sane people.
“It’s all but impossible to change people’s minds and hearts, Raych. It’s enough to try and perhaps eliminate the worst of the injustices.”
credits must be raised by asking the citizens to hand over part of their wealth for government use. Presumably, since the government will then work efficiently, the citizens can better spend their credits in this way than to hoard it—each man to himself—while
“However, though the request is reasonable and the citizenry is better off paying taxes as their price for maintaining a stable and efficient government, they are nevertheless reluctant to do so. In order to overcome this reluctance, governments must make it appear that they are not taking too many credits, and that they are considering each citizen’s rights and benefits. In other words, they must lower the percentage taken out of low incomes; they must allow deductions of various kinds to be made before the tax is assessed, and so on. “As time goes on, the tax situation inevitably grows more
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no human mind has created those equations directly. We have merely spent decades programming more powerful computers and they have devised and stored the equations, but, of course, we don’t know if they are valid and have meaning. It depends entirely on how valid and meaningful the programming is in the first place.”
“I found that there were ways in which the equations could be changed so as to indicate a reduction in friction. In every such case, however, a reduction in friction here meant an increase in friction there. Never at any time was there a total decrease or, for that matter, a total increase in the friction within a closed group—that is, one in which no old members leave and no new members come in. What I proved, with the help of Elar’s achaotic equations, was that this was true despite any conceivable action anyone could take. Hari calls it ‘the law of conservation of personal problems.’ “It
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It was part of growing older, no doubt. There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.
To be sure, he tended to treat her as a rather undersized adult, but Wanda seemed to like that.
The older man pointed to debris—assorted refuse jettisoned from passing ground-cars or dropped by careless pedestrians—strewn along the walkway. “In the old days,” Seldon continued, “you would never see litter like this. The security officers were vigilant and municipal maintenance crews provided round-the-clock upkeep of all public areas. But, most important, no one would even think of dumping his trash in such a manner. Trantor was our home; we took pride in it.
