The Robots of Dawn Quotes

“People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Meaning well is a poor defense,”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Is that it, Daneel?”
Daneel paused, then said, “I am not certain what is meant by the smell of a rose, but if a rose on Earth is the common flower that is called a rose on Aurora, and if by its ‘smell’ you mean a property that can be detected, sensed, or measured by human beings, then surely calling a rose by another sound-combination—and holding all else equal—would not affect the smell or any other of its intrinsic properties.”
“True. And yet changes in name do result in changes in perception where human beings are concerned.”
“I do not see why, Partner Elijah.”
“Because human beings are often illogical, Daneel. It is not an admirable characteristic.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Are there Laws of Humanics as there are Laws of Robotics? How many Laws of Humanics might there be and how can they be expressed mathematically? I don’t know. “Perhaps, though, there may come a day when someone will work out the Laws of Humanics and then be able to predict the broad strokes of the future, and know what might be in store for humanity, instead of merely guessing as I do, and know what to do to make things better, instead of merely speculating. I dream sometimes of founding a mathematical science which I think of as ‘psychohistory,’ but I know I can’t and I fear no one ever will.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Baley said, sharply, “Nevertheless bound by friendship. Do not, for your own sake, test the force of our—” Now it was he who paused and, as though to his own surprise, completed the sentence impossibly, “—love.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Here were the same long cold bare corridors, the same lowest common denominator of design and decoration, with every light source designed so as to irritate as few people as possible and to please just as few.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“You may uncover more and, eventually, what seems altogether a mystery to us now may unfold and become plain.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“You see, Elijah, when you live several centuries, you have plenty of time to lose thousands of things. Be th-thankful for short life, Elijah.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Are you well, sir?” asked Giskard. It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no worse than the questions asked by human beings, sometimes with wild inappropriateness, out of the programming of etiquette.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Ideally, the Jump took zero-time—literally zero—and, if it were carried through with perfect smoothness, there would not, could not be any biological sensation at all. Physicists maintained, however, that perfect smoothness required infinite energy so that there was always an “effective time” that was not quite zero, though it could be made as short as desired. It was that which produced that odd and essentially harmless feeling of inversion.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Not that Giskard had ever intruded on him at an inconvenient moment, Baley thought idly.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“I’m a creature of the irrational fears of my society.” Baley shrugged. “So are we all.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“It was the “Busy Buzz of Brotherhood,” to use the phrase popular among Earth’s politicians and journalists.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Connotations and associations; the subtle effect, not of dictionary meaning, but of years of usage; the nature of the sentences and conditions and events in which one has experienced the use of one word as compared with that of the other.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“I cannot say what I feel in any human sense, Partner Elijah. I can say, however, that the sight of you seems to make my thoughts flow more easily, and the gravitational pull on my body seems to assault my senses with lesser insistence”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Nunca en su vida había gozado tanto del acto de comer y por primera vez lamentaba que los límites fisiológicos le impidieran seguir comiendo indefinidamente.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Any accident involving a robot-driven car would set off another antirobot riot.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“And then, when human beings arrive, the robots can be restored to more robotic schemes of behavior.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“the fact that Jander was Fastolfe’s own creation does not give him the right to destroy it.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Enlightened self-interest’ they call it.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“But murder applies specifically to human beings. One does not murder an animal, for instance.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Roth might have warned him, but he had not. He had clearly chosen his words deliberately, in order to give no sign. The official was a woman. There was no reason for this not to be. Any official might be a woman. The Secretary-General might be a woman. There were women on the police force, even a woman with the rank of captain. It was just that, without warning, one didn’t expect it in any given case. There were times in history when women entered administrative posts in considerable numbers. Baley knew that; he knew history well. But this wasn’t one of those times.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“people who don’t expect justice don’t have to suffer disappointment”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“I thought you could feel love for me. I don’t say you loved me, but it seemed to me you could. I never had that and, although in ancient literature they talked of it, I didn’t know what they meant any more than when men in those same books talked about ‘honor’ and killed each other for its sake.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“A civilization that is expanding through space will not need our few worlds and will probably be too intellectually advanced to feel the need to batter its way into hegemony here. If, however, we are surrounded by a more lively, a more vibrant civilization, we will wither away by the mere force of the comparison; we will die of the realization of what we have become and of the potential we have wasted.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn