There’s something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.
And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism.
The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.
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.
What broke loose is popularly and succinctly described as hell.
Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.
They are useful, but they are too strong – and too uncontrolled. They are Outlanders, educated apart from religion. On the one hand, we put knowledge into their hands, and on the other, we remove our strongest hold upon them.
Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds.
Now why should there be a special word for a man with dark skin? There was no special word for a man with blue eyes, or large ears, or curly hair.
Groups, like individuals, will rise to strange heights in answer to a challenge, and vegetate in the absence of a challenge.
Innumerable surveys have made it quite clear that when a respectable elderly man makes up to a giggling young lady, it is not the giggling young lady so accosted that is offended by the action, but rather the granite-faced dowager, standing unnoticed by her side, who is. It is she who makes derogatory remarks concerning dirty old men, and is quite likely to attack him with an umbrella.
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.
The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. Hari.
From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the vagrant stars at the Galaxy’s rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation influence.
Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.
Their whole training has been authoritarian. They are sure that the Emperor, just because he is the Emperor, is all-powerful. And they are sure that the Board of Trustees, simply because it is the Board of Trustees acting in the name of the Emperor, cannot be in a position where it does not give the orders.
And his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours.
Beliefs can’t be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly complete mental discruption results. Mild cases – hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced cases – madness and suicide.
The machines do not solve problems with greater insight than men do, only faster. Only faster!
If, from a distance of seven thousand parsecs, the fall of Kalgan to the armies of the Mule had produced reverberations that had excited the curiosity of an old Trader, the apprehension of a dogged captain, and the annoyance of a meticulous mayor – to those on Kalgan itself, it produced nothing and excited no one. It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.