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Foundation and Earth stands by itself. I hope you enjoy it. —Isaac Asimov, New York City, 1986
“You can’t have geniuses and saints without having people far outside the norm, and I don’t see how you can have such things on only one side of the norm. There is bound to be a certain symmetry.
Normal distribution
Trevize was not surprised at the other’s mild surprise. In the new gravitic ships, there was simply no way of detecting takeoff. There were no inertial effects; no accelerational push; no noise; no vibration.
Trevize said, “I see you have used the meal to think of a new type of persuasion by threat. Am I now to fear a lynch mob?”
I accept only what I am forced to accept by reasonably reliable evidence, and keep that acceptance tentative pending the arrival of further evidence. That doesn’t make us popular.” “Why not?” said Trevize. “We wouldn’t be popular anywhere. Where is the world whose people don’t prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty? —Consider
A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment.” “Surely,” said Pelorat, “such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don’t think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive.”
He had never been on a deserted world before; never heard of a deserted world before; never thought a world could be deserted. All the worlds he had known of till now, once they had been populated by human beings, remained so populated forever.
I suppose it is cowardly of me to hide in your protective shadows, but I can’t feel proper shame when I’m too busy feeling grateful that I needn’t be in a position of possibly having to use force.”
If you start dismissing anyone or anything you want to do away with as just a this or just a that, you can destroy anything you wish. There are always categories you can find for them.”
A convention, so powerful and so primordially old, must have started on Earth—and that brought Trevize’s mind, with a jerk, back to the question of the habitable planet.
“Frankly,” said Trevize, “it’s annoying not to know the pronoun to use in connection with the creature. It impedes thought and conversation to hesitate forever at the pronoun.”
Human beings are very conservative in some ways and virtually never change numerical conventions once they grow used to them. They even come to mistake them for laws of nature, I think.
Binaries have less planetary material than single stars do. Such planets as do form about them often have relatively unstable orbits and are very rarely of a type that is reasonably habitable.
To which Fallom said, inevitably, “Why?” and Bliss, after some thought, deciding there was no sensible way of answering, returned the universal reply, “Because!”
Trevize found this sound particularly wearing, rather barbaric, and unpleasantly like the memory of the barking of the dogs on Aurora—not that the sound was like barking, but the emotions it gave rise to were similar. Bliss looked as though she would like to place her hands over her ears,
Knocking the accordian in scifi literature
They are human beings, but they have brains firmly inculcated with the equivalent of the Laws of Robotics. They have to value life, really value it.
“Here it is. The two known axioms deal with human beings, and they are based on the unspoken axiom that human beings are the only intelligent species in the Galaxy, and therefore the only organisms whose actions are significant in the development of society and history. That is the unstated axiom: that there is only one species of intelligence in the Galaxy and that it is Homo sapiens.
