Foundation's Edge

„an official expression of opinion carries weight and can be dangerous.”

„A person who expects the completely sophisticated and who guards against it is quite apt never to think of the primitive.”

„Anyone who displays a capacity for double-dealing must forever be suspected of being capable of displaying it again.”

„When one's home has a really excellent computer capable of reaching other computers anywhere in the Galaxy, one scarcely needs to budge.”

„Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference.”

„Do nothing unless you must, and when you must act — hesitate.”

„inappropriate modesty can be very dangerous.”

„the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

„Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind — not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought — may solve the problem for you.”

„The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them.”

„If you think vaguely of someone when someone is thinking vaguely of you, there is a mutual, escalating stimulation which in a matter of seconds makes the two thoughts sharp, decisive, and, to all appearances, simultaneous.”

„however small the chance of catastrophe might be, if enough people take enough chances, the catastrophe must happen eventually.”

„Human beings are diurnal in nature, after all. It seems to me that among the very first tasks of a developing technology would be the conversion of night to day.”

„if something pleasant comes my way, there's no reason in the Galaxy I ought not to respond normally.”

„All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. We're in no way different ourselves.”

„What good would it do to be storybook brave?”

„If you ask for too much, you lose even that which you have.”

„Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.”

„To know when a truth will do is admirable, since no nontruth can be presented with the same sincerity.”

„The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie.”

„It is no shame to aspire to something even if it is beyond your reach.”

„People have a tendency to take it for granted that they are better than their neighbors; that their culture is older and superior to that of other worlds; that what is good in other worlds has been borrowed from them, while what is bad is distorted or perverted in the borrowing or invented elsewhere. And the tendency is to equate superiority in quality with superiority in duration.”

„You underestimate the depths to which mysticism can bury rationality.”

„it is easier for life to maintain itself — once established — than to develop in the first place.”

„A myth or legend is simply not made up out of a vacuum. Nothing is — or can be. Somehow there is a kernel of truth behind it, however distorted that might be.”

„when you hear tales that simply shroud matters in thickening mists of doubt, surely you must feel the itch to explore, to find out.”

„I don't believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”

„It's one thing to have guts; it's another to be crazy.”

„if B follows A, then there is at least a possibility that A caused B.”

„Do voluntarily now what you may soon be constrained to do. Do peacefully and without bloodshed now what you may be forced to do by woeful disaster.”

„All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos.”

„what if there are a million intelligences in the Galaxy, but only one that is expansionist — ourselves? The others would all remain at home, unobtrusive, hidden.”

„acting like a bully doesn't make you less helpless. It just makes you a helpless bully.”

„If history just goes past me, it's because there are enough historians or that I'm not well adapted to it.”

„We're all individuals — we're all separate organisms — but we all share an overall consciousness. The inanimate planet does so least of all, the various forms of life to a varying degree, and human beings most of all — but we all share.”

„Each cell is, to a certain extent, an independent chemical factory, but all draw from a common fund of raw materials brought to it by a common transportation system, all deliver wastes into common channels, and all contribute to an overall group consciousness.”

„My consciousness is far advanced beyond that of any individual cell — incredibly far advanced. The fact that we, in turn, are part of a still greater group consciousness on a higher level does not reduce us to the level of cells.”

„Each new individual is a reshuffling of molecules and genes into something new. New talents, new abilities, new contributions to Gaia. We must have them — and the only way we can is to make room.”

„There is no more desire to live past one's time than to die before it.”

„there are many different Universes that can exist — virtually an infinite number. Every single event that takes place can take place or not take place, or can take place in this fashion or in that fashion, and each of an enormous number of alternatives will result in a future course of events that are distinct to at least some degree.”

„No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate — like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history — until it degenerates into fables.”

„The falsely dramatic drives out the truly dull.”

„Three Laws might have been. The orthodox view has the following reading: 1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

„Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.”

„To be brave is sometimes to be foolish.”

„Do not make the mistake of seeing only the results that appear at once.”

„Deeds may do the job where words fail.”

„You must come to the place without knowing anything to begin with. You must learn it all there. You must then do what you must do — but you must do it calmly and unemotionally.”

„We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it.”