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It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child,
He was not aware of a jugular vein delicately connecting the forty billion of Trantor with the rest of the Galaxy. He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.
A further necessary assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random.…
Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
- hari seldon
“I shall not be alive half a decade hence,” said Seldon, “and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, ‘humanity.’
I, as Mayor of Terminus City, have just enough power to blow my own nose and perhaps to sneeze if you countersign an order giving me permission.
“That Anacreon no longer has a nuclear-power economy. If they had, our friend would undoubtedly have realized that plutonium, except in ancient tradition, is not used in power plants. And therefore it follows that the rest of the Periphery no longer has nuclear power either.
Brilliant Deduction
Listen, we have to fight with guns, not with words.
Still you are rather young.” Dryly. “It is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life.
We must let things drift so long as we possibly can, and by space, that’s what I intend doing.”
the regent scratched one ear gently in affected abstraction—“I
Hardin once said: ‘To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.’
Since when does prejudice follow any law but its own.
Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweeps of economics and sociology.
We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can’t follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.
Innovator's dilemma
