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she was well practiced in the political wars and knew that if she could place her opponent off-balance at the start then the battle was half-won.
All human beings all over the Galaxy are of a single species. A single species cannot originate on more than one planet.
find myself quite comfortable, although I miss fresh air, nature, and all that. Strange! Never seemed to notice all that sort of thing when it was all around me.
“I have always found in my own work—quite different from yours, of course, but possibly we may generalize—that zeroing in tightly on a particular problem is self-defeating. Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind—not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought—may solve the problem for you.”
He could only maneuver the man as though he were a bull, forcing him to miss. That would serve to break his morale as direct opposition would not.
“Human beings are diurnal in nature, after all. It seems to me that among the very first tasks of a developing technology would be the conversion of night to day. In fact, if a world lacked technology and developed one, you ought to be able to follow the progress of technological development by the increase in light upon the darkened surface.
what the Library is to me, an attractive dark-eyed damsel—or five or six—might be to you.”
keep forgetting you’ve never been on another world. Every inhabited world has its own odor. It’s the general vegetation, mostly, though I suppose the animals and even the human beings contribute. And as far as I know, nobody ever likes the smell of any world when he first lands on it. But you’ll get used to it, Janov. In a few hours, I promise you won’t notice.”
There’s no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war. We would never have survived.
“I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
‘The falsely dramatic drives out the truly dull,’
‘1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’
there are myths that would match anything that any of us can make up, given sufficiently ingenious interpretation.
it is better to go to defeat with free will than to live in meaningless security as a cog in a machine.
