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.
How many people is the earth able to sustain?
What would I do if I knew I only had six months to live? Type faster.
It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial.
The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.
Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Why is it, I wonder, that anyone who displays superior athletic ability is an object of admiration to his classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of hatred?
The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.
Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.
Fertility is hereditary. If your parents didn’t have any children, neither will you. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems a bad dream, a sudden coming back to life of a nightmare, a renewed march of an Army of the Night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.
It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason – if you pick the proper postulates.
It’s just science fiction so it’s allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It’s just science fiction, so it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noises and flashing lights.
God, how that stings! I’ve spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that’s just science fiction.
There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
Scientists derive satisfaction from figuring out the puzzle. It’s about the quest, not the grail.
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.