"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

"To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong."

"I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible."

"I'm forty-nine, not fifteen, and I've made my peace with myself. Had I been handsome and stupid when I was fifteen, or twenty-one, as, at that time in life, I wished I had been, I would undoubtedly now no longer be handsome--but I'd still be stupid. So, in the long run, I've won out."

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right."

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

"I think you are wrong, partner Elijah. My briefing on human characteristics here among the people of Earth includes the information that, unlike the men of the Outer Worlds, they are trained from birth to accept authority. Apparently this is the result of your way of living. One man, representing authority firmly enough, was quite sufficient, as I proved. Your own desire for a squad car was only an expression, really, of your almost instinctive wish for superior authority to take responsibility out of your hands. On my own world, I admit that what I did would have been most unjustified."

"What's exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there's now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it's time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There's only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it."

"I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing."

"Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us."

"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."

"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? - in ancient astronauts? - in the Bermuda triangle? - in life after death?No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

"Any book worth banning is a book worth reading."

"And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning."

"How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?"

"Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see."

"So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5."

"All evil is good become cancerous."

"Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency."

"These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing."

"In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery."

"It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety."

"Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well maybe once."

"It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong."

"The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing."

"It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion."

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

"Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason."

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

"The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals."

"When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."

"Have you ever come across something you couldn't explain?""Explain in what way? I could explain a ghost by saying, 'yes, that's a ghost.' I take it, that's not what you mean."

"One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge."

"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."

"Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time.""Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly."

"Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage."

"I shall not be alive a half decade hence, said Seldon, "and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, 'man."

"There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save."

"He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man."

"It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?"

"Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise for them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds."

"I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him."

"It was a long time since he'd done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. He was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned."

"Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning."

"Weak emperors mean strong viceroys."

"Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience."

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."

"Even at the time, [he] felt his anger to be out of proportion to the cause, but it represented an accumulation of resentment."

"The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans."