Riose laughed suddenly. “He foresaw that? Then he foresaw wrong, my good scientist. I suppose you call yourself that. Why, the Empire is more powerful now than it has been in a millennium. Your old eyes are blinded by the cold bleakness of the border. Come to the inner worlds some day; come to the warmth and the wealth of the center.
A really good story does not answer everything. After all, life doesn’t answer everything. There remain ambiguities. There remains room for doubt.
There are always individuals who pit their minds against the general modes of thought and who are arrogant enough to feel that they alone are right and that the many are wrong.
A strong offensive is indicated. The stalemate you seem to be satisfied with is fatal. It would be a confession of weakness to all the worlds of the Periphery, where the appearance of strength is all-important, and there’s not one vulture among.
Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic.
We can see, now, that the social background of the Empire makes wars of conquest impossible for it. Under weak Emperors, it is torn apart by generals competing for a worthless and surely death-bringing throne. Under strong Emperors, the Empire is frozen into a paralytic rigor in which disintegration apparently ceases for the moment, but only at the sacrifice of all possible growth.
To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was “system,” an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was “industry,” indecision when right was “caution,” and blind stubbornness when wrong, “determination.” And withal he wasted no money, killed no man needlessly, and meant extremely well.
There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain.
Life is not like a murder mystery. In mysteries people always do the same thing. Then when some little thing is out of line, some wise-guy amateur detective makes big deductions. In real life, people don’t do the same things all the time. They do different things at different times. In real life, people are crazy.
There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.
It is not important what can or cannot be done. What is important is what people will or will not believe can be done.
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.
His idiot face gets redder and his eyes bulge and his ears block. I’d say his mind stops functioning, but I lack the proof of any other state from which it might stop.” Bronowski.
An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched.
But what could I want with riches? The true wealth is the love of one’s people.
Work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes undying part of a totality. That totality is human life. Past and present and to come forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens and thousands of years. And has been growing more elaborate, and on the whole more beautiful.
Consider – to give up a heathen is to lose nothing for your ancestors, whereas with the gold you get in exchange you can ornament the shrines of their holy spirits. And surely, were gold evil in itself, if such a thing could be, the evil would depart of necessity once the metal were put to such pious use.
So it is only the combination of strong Emperor and strong general that can harm the Foundation; for a strong Emperor cannot be dethroned easily, and a strong general is forced to turn outwards, past the frontiers.
He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man.
We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it.