Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That’s how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.
All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.
That is, he made boasts. But boasts are wind and deeds are hard.
That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.
I do. It’s a mass psychosis, an unprintable mob panic. Ga-LAX-y, Randu, what do you expect? Here you have a whole culture brought up to a blind, blubbering belief that a folk hero of the past has everything all planned out and is taking care of every little piece of their unprintable lives. The thought-pattern evoked has religious characteristics, and you know what that means.
A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being’s ultimate good after all.
You lack the capacity to decipher this particular puzzle.
You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn’t another behind it; no statement that hasn’t three meanings.
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 can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.
The government doesn’t want any system of transmitting information to remain unbroken, unless it’s under its own control.
Anyone who displays a capacity for double-dealing must forever be suspected of being capable of displaying it again.
The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books – so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.
Now tell me what happened – in words. I want your translation of the mathematics.
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.
On Earth, we have a continuous influx of young people who are willing to change because they haven’t had time to grow hard set in their ways. I suppose there’s some optimum. A life long enough for real accomplishment and short enough to make way for youth at a rate that’s not too slow.
A man without weaknesses serves only to make everyone else conscious of his own imperfections.
Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics,” and here they are: 1. A robot may not injure 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.