In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits.

Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; nochange. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what istheirs.

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

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!

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

To insult someone we call him ‘bestial’. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult.

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

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

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

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

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I...

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a...

Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, “How did you learn all this, Isaac?””From you, Pappa”, I said.”From me? I don’t know any of this”.”You didn’t have to, Pappa”, I said. “You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came...

Fortran”. [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the...

Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.

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...

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

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

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

The Imperial forces must keep their hands off, but they find that they can do much even so. Each sector is encouraged to be suspicious of its neighbors. Within each sector, economic and social classes are encouraged to wage a kind of war with each other. The result is that all over Trantor it is...

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you.

It has been said in this courtroom that only a human being can be free. It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free. I wish for freedom.

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

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn’t help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, “Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one.” (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: “I love you, Janet.”) [They were. -Janet.]

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...

What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

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

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, “spirits.” Methyl alcohol, they called “wood spirit”; ethyl alcohol, “wine spirit.” Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as “spirits.” (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word “alcohol” was taken, call ethyl alcohol “spirit”...

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

How 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 that war itself?

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be… This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on...

All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can’t help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface...

Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task — such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping — I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.

A circle has no end.

The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It’s the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect–but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

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”,...

Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature’s mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience

Bible: Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behaviour which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

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

It takes more than capital to swing business. You’ve got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by – Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Gewalt ist die letzte Zuflucht des Unfähigen.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

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.