Some day, with all that the Cities could do, the available calories per person would simply fall below basic subsistence level.
And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end.
You can’t understand human motivation. You can only understand your damned machines because you’re a machine yourself, with skin on.
The men in this station survive by virtue of their jellyfish quality. There isn’t one who would stand against him. Trying to rally the others to put pressure on “Hallam” would be like asking strands of cooked spaghetti to come to attention.
Life is a successive symphony of losses.
To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.
And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool production of 12,000 years of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate in mathematics freshly obtained and an invitation from the great Hari Seldon to come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat mysterious Seldon Project. What.
Baley said, sharply, “Nevertheless bound by friendship. Do not, for your own sake, test the force of our – ” Now it was he who paused and, as though to his own surprise, completed the sentence impossibly, “ – love.
Force yourself to laugh and you’ll soon find something to laugh about. A being causes his own feelings. Splurge on it!
He would have to ask questions constantly, take nothing for granted. There would be so many opportunities to miss the obvious, so many chances to misunderstand, so many ways of taking the wrong path.
When one begins by expressing lack of competence in a given field, it usually implies that a flat opinion in that field will follow almost immediately.
It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics.
We were never under any delusions as to which was more important, an individual or humanity.
Are you interested in robotics, Mr. Byerley?” “Only in the legal aspects.
Logical but not reasonable. Wasn’t that the definition of a robot?
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more. Seldon predicted a series of crises through the thousand years of growth, each of which would force a new turning of our history into a pre-calculated path. It is those crises which direct us – and therefore a crisis must come now.
We speak of time and mind, which do not easily yield to categories. We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam of both. We separate good and evil and find that mind is an amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.
He was not young any longer. Life no longer stretched before him as a vast uncharted field, its horizon lost in the distance.
You mean you’re going to risk your life on something that isn’t your business?” Gorov smiled thinly. Ponyets said, “You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren’t patriotic?” “Notoriously not. Pioneers never are.
But I still can’t quite grasp what you’re telling me. I find it impossible to believe that there would be such unreasoning feeling against harmless people.” Amaryl said bitterly, “That’s because you’ve never had any occasion to interest yourself in such things. It can all pass right under your nose and you wouldn’t smell a thing because it doesn’t affect you.