"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

"The thanks of a weak one are but of little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way- and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite unseemly great."

"No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth..."

"Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful."

"And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile - except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison."

"For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want " but an end?"

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere."

"Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them."

"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."

"We are gaining the knowledge science is giving us that. Now we need wisdom as well."

"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."

"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."

"She's qualified all right. She understands robots like a sister-comes from hating human beings so much, I think."

"It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition."

"Past glories are poor feeding."

"Well, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, & a thirteenth..."

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."

"It is a mistake, he said, "to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort."

"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."

"All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end."

"Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, "I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn't that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?"

"Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers."

"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.""Surely," said Pelorat, "such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don't think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive."Bliss said, "I don't have your pleasant faith in human reason, Pel. It seems to me to be quite conceivable that when a planetary society consists of Isolates, local and even individual concerns might easily by allowed to overcome planetary concerns."

"I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic."

"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate."