Foundation and Empire

„My own knowledge is the result of two accidents: the accidents of being born the son of my father, and of being born the native of my country.”

„Circulation ceases first at the outer edges. It will take a while yet for the decay to reach the heart.”

„…the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it.”

„The times make the man.”

„…the mere act of not being a traitor is also a long way from agreeing to be an active helper.”

„…there is not a biped extant who can study a disease before his eyes with those same eyes. There is not one who can count a pulse-beat without a book of the ancients before him.”

„An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched.”

„…even a romantic idiot can be a deadly weapon when an unromantic rebel uses him as a tool.”

„There is a place for a decisive gamble when you know your enemy and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all against an unknown enemy is boldness in itself.”

„The deeper economic and sociological forces aren't directed by individual men.”

„A Trader has to be something of everything.”

„If wild luck comes our way there's no law says Seldon can't take advantage of it.”

„The interstellar depths themselves would be home, my sweet, were you but with me!”

„The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”

„Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law: no change. Despotism! They know one rule: force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.”

„society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience”

„I must serve faithfully — and he serves most faithfully who serves Truth.”

„Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.”

„You're surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can't stand up under it. In the sleep period, you're free.”

„Beliefs can't be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly complete mental disruption results. Mild cases — hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced cases — madness and suicide.”

„We've been blinded by Seldon's psychohistory, one of the first propositions of which is that the individual does not count, does not make history, and that complex social and economic factors override him, make a puppet out of him.”

„The Galaxy won't stop rotating because one man dies.”

„Let us leave heroics for the fools who are impressed by it.”

„the mistiness of distance hides the truth.”

„Deeds are hard indeed, until begun.”

„All life seemed to have lost its quality of action, and changed into an infinite sea of hibernation.”

„Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.”

„the consciousness of power came, and with it, the desire to make up for the miserable position of my earlier life. It isn't easy to be a freak — to have a mind and an understanding and be a freak. Laughter and cruelty! To be different! To be an outsider!”

„if a strong man can lift five hundred pounds, it does not mean that he is eager to do so continuously.”

„The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.”

„My mistakes were my own, and I take responsibility for them.”