Quotes from Isaac Asimov

The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be allowed.

Presumably, such is the folly of human beings, the prospects of intellectual suicide might not stop them from indulging their hatred

Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand.

There's no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war.

The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control.

and he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it.

With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window. Through it shone the stars! Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.

He would do worse than his worst if he had to.

I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?

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

the only people that inherited anything by right of birth were the congenital idiots.

The word "robot" is from a Czech word meaning "compulsory labor.

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Baley's lips twitched. He had guessed that in some ways robotic logic must fall short and he was convinced of it now. As the roboticist had said: Logical but not reasonable.

Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence.

What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine?" "You think my convictions are for sale?" "Why not?" came the cold response. "Isn't that your business, buying and selling?" "Only at a profit," said Mallow

He never created a finish product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution.

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

Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.' R. Giskard Reventlov

Consider the question suitably modified.

And his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours.

It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract.

They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.

if we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will run better and, most of all, a world in which the individual will count for more, not less.