Foundation and Earth

„Merely feeling right isn't enough.”

„I have to know whether the decision is wrong or right. It's not enough merely to feel it's right.”

„Things decay, perish, are destroyed through inefficiency or war.”

„each person must find happiness in his or her own manner.”

„You do have this uncomfortable explosive way of jumping to conclusions before you hear one out.”

„Even if all of Gaia knows your business intimately, that doesn't mean that Gaia necessarily cares.”

„I'm borne down by a responsibility I don't want and don't know how to get rid of. That may make me sound unpleasant when I don't intend to be.”

„if criminals are the price we must pay for rebels, heretics, and geniuses, I'm willing to pay it. I demand the price be paid.”

„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.”

„The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

„It's really peculiar when I stop to think of my moderately long life, that half of all the events I have experienced were squeezed into the last few months.”

„it is not wise to trust one's self overmuch. We naturally see our virtues with clearer eyes than we see our defects. We are anxious to do what is right; not necessarily what seems right to us, but what is right, objectively, if such a thing as objective right exists.”

„Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.”

„I could make wild promises, but of what value would that be to you? The fact that my promises are cautious and limited should show you that they are at least sincere.”

„my notions of morality tell me that I don't trifle with my friend's possessions — or his companionships.”

„Comporellian men are unsatisfying. I accept the fact that morality is an absolute good, but it does tend to burden the men of this world with guilt, so that they become unadventurous, unenterprising, slow to begin, quick to conclude, and, in general, unskilled.”

„Some words are vulgar, some are inappropriate, some under particular circumstances would be hurtful.”

„All is bad that is imposed from without.”

„He is a Skeptic. We have them, you know. There are always individuals who pit their minds against the general modes of thought and who are arrogant enough to feel that they alone are right and that the many are wrong.”

„Superstition always directs action in the absence of knowledge.”

„I am a Skeptic and I am professionally unattuned to believing in surfaces.”

„I accept only what I am forced to accept by reasonably reliable evidence, and keep that acceptance tentative pending the arrival of further evidence.”

„Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?”

„Common belief, even universal belief, is not, in itself, evidence.”

„a society that depends totally on robots becomes soft and decadent, dwindling and dying out of sheer boredom or, more subtly, by losing the will to live.”

„No one can encompass all of knowledge.”

„The fact is that I'm myself — here — now.”

„No conjurer could really do what he makes you think he does.”

„A human being has consciousness and his behavior is sufficiently complicated to make it appear to be free will.”

„An argument may seem thoroughly logical and elegant and yet contain unexpressed assumptions.”

„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.”

„in the absence of definite knowledge, we might as well look where it's easiest to see.”

„it is remarkable what one can do if the need is great enough.”

„I may not know what it is I'm foreseeing, but if something is suggested afterward, I would recognize it if that were indeed what I foresaw.”

„when you have no basis on which to make a choice yourself, where's the harm in at least considering the computer's choice?”

„keeping a language relatively unchanged is not necessarily a sign of degeneration. There are advantages to it. Documents preserved for centuries and millennia retain their meaning and give greater longevity and authority to historical records.”

„A small stroke of good fortune is better than none.”

„when members of an expanding society set foot upon an inoffensive and static one, that mere touch is filled with potential harm.”

„Freedom is nothing if it is not to live as you wish! Exactly as you wish!”

„All history is legend, more or less.”

„Society defines what constitutes an offense.”

„Confidence first, then information.”

„what's a little monotony? It spoils one's pleasure, but it keeps one alive.”

„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.”

„we are enclosed in our private skins surrounding our private thoughts, and we think first and foremost of ourselves. Self-defense is our first law of nature, even if that means harming everyone else in existence.”

„the Universe is rather hard to grasp if you come at it suddenly.”

„How does one deal with an alien and ancient culture where the simplest taken-for-granted matters are made unrecognizable?”

„Life is not necessarily dangerous because it is different.”

„Playing nursemaid establishes communication, however, allays fear, supplies love.”

„if human beings disappear altogether, the last trace of discipline goes.”

„There's natural size, a natural complexity, some optimum quality for everything, whether star or atom, and it's certainly true of living things and living societies.”

„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.”

„To try so hard to hide something means there is something there to hide.”

„Everything has its exceptions.”

„There's no way life in the sea can develop a technology. Technology is always based on fire, and fire is impossible in the sea.”

„men are always the greater babblers.”

„myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences.”

„no one writes the clear and apparent truth — if such a thing can even be said to exist.”

„you mustn't believe something just because you want to believe it.”

„if I knew what I feared, I might not have to fear it.”

„Life of all kinds must, we all know, constantly be coming to an end in order that other life might endure, but never uselessly, never to no end.”

„The more advanced and complex the brain, the more unstable it is, and the more quickly it deteriorates.”

„An invader that finds us divided against ourselves will dominate us all, or destroy us all.”