Forward the Foundation Quotes

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.”
           
-I did nothing for you.”
           
-You loved me and your love made me--human.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“You don’t need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.'

'For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of you. I don't. I want more good ones.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“people live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“What we gain in the straightaways, we lose in the roundabouts. That's the way the universe works. We've just got to fool it somehow.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“They want to be treated as equals, they say, and so they do, but, given a chance, they have no desire to treat others as equals.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Intuition! What’s that? Define it!” “Easily. 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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Trantorians, poor specimens that they are, know nothing about open air, free water, and the true balance of nature.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“It is one thing to be democratic, quite another to be inconvenienced.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“And finally, people are against it.” “But why?” “Because they’re against science in general. You should know this as well as anyone, Professor.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“He seemed so to Hari Seldon, certainly. Seldon stopped his morning constitutional to watch him.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Perché tante persone passavano la loro vita senza cercare la risposta a tutte le domande che c'erano... anzi, senza nemmeno porsi le domande? si chiese Seldon. Nella vita, esisteva qualcosa di più eccitante della ricerca delle risposte?”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Lo so. Lo sappiamo tutti. Forse la lezione del passato potrà insegnarci cosa evitare. E poi, la tirannia che c'è adesso è reale. Quella che potrebbe esistere in futuro è solamente potenziale. Non possiamo sottrarci sempre ai cambiamenti pensando che la situazione potrebbe cambiare in peggio, altrimenti addio speranza di riuscire un giorno a sconfiggere l'ingiustizia.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“ameliorate”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“He was not young any longer. Life no longer stretched before him as a vast uncharted field, its horizon lost in the distance.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“I suspect you will find that no individual is ever truly crucial. Not even I—or you.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“He had no credits to continue his work—no credits to locate others like Wanda, no credits to pay his workers on the Psychohistory Project at Streeling, no credits to set up his all-important Encyclopedia Project at the Galactic Library. Now what?”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“to push the boulder, like Sisyphus, up to the top of a hill, only to see it roll to the bottom again?” “Who’s Sisyphus?” “A character in a primitive myth. Yugo, you must do more reading.” Amaryl shrugged. “So I can learn about Sisyphus? Not important.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“At their peak, the Globalists may have persuaded 10 percent of the population of the planet to be part of the movement. Only 10 percent, but they were a vehement minority that drowned out the indifferent majority and threatened to take over.” “But they didn’t, did they?” “No, they didn’t. What happened was that Globalism caused a diminishing of Imperial trade and the Heliconian economy slid into the doldrums. When the belief began to affect the pocketbooks of the population, it lost popularity rapidly.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“The Zeroth Law states that a robot can’t harm humanity as a whole.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“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.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation