Foundation's Edge (Foundation, #4)

by Isaac Asimov

When one’s home has a really excellent computer capable of reaching other computers anywhere in the Galaxy, one scarcely needs to budge, you know.

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

You said the advance of civilization meant the continuing restriction of privacy. —Well, I don’t want to be that advanced. I want freedom to move undetected as I wish—unless and until I want protection. So I would feel better, a great deal better, if there weren’t a hyper-relay on board.”

I hate this feeling of forever talking to myself.”

“I will never understand people.” “There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself—no offense intended.”

“What good would it do to be storybook brave?”

‘The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie.’ ”

“It is no shame to aspire to something even if it is beyond your reach.

you are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can.

People have a tendency to take it for granted that they are better than their neighbors; that their culture is older and superior to that of other worlds; that what is good in other worlds has been borrowed from them, while what is bad is distorted or perverted in the borrowing or invented elsewhere. And the tendency is to equate superiority in quality with superiority in duration.

“I mean, suppose nuclear explosions took place on Earth?” “On Earth’s surface? Impossible. 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.

Even if one must stare the bull in the face, one needn’t slap its muzzle, as the saying goes.”

‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’

I hate talking to a war office that is as ridiculously hidebound as one is sure to be after one hundred and twenty years of peace,

All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos.

“I don’t like being helpless,” said Trevize grumpily. “Who does? But acting like a bully doesn’t make you less helpless. It just makes you a helpless bully.

‘The falsely dramatic drives out the truly dull,’ said Liebel Gennerat about fifteen centuries ago. It’s called Gennerat’s Law now.”

—Humanity once lived with robots, you know, but it didn’t work well.”

“The robots were deeply indoctrinated with what are called the Three Laws of Robotics, which date back into prehistory. There are several versions of what those Three Laws might have been. The orthodox view has the following reading: ‘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.’

“The robots were entirely kind. Their labors were clearly humane and were meant entirely for the benefit of all—which somehow made them all the more unbearable.

“Every robotic advance made the situation worse. Robots were developed with telepathic capacity, but that meant that even human thought could be monitored, so that human behavior became still more dependent on robotic oversight.

“Again robots grew steadily more like human beings in appearance, but they were unmistakably robots in behavior and being humanoid made them more repulsive...

The new worlds were founded fresh and they did not even want to remember their bitter humiliation as children under robot nursemaids. They kept no records of it and they forgot.”

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word “intuition.”

“We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it.”