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fd9d71b
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Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.
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Isaac Asimov |
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8b96020
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You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.
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Isaac Asimov |
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e0a9e92
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It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
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psychology
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Isaac Asimov |
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b4c168d
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The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity--a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.
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prophetic
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Isaac Asimov |
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cf44dda
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In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile
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liberal-arts
machines
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Isaac Asimov |
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ba3c023
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Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.
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Isaac Asimov |
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21b65b9
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The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity
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Isaac Asimov |
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8656420
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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.
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Isaac Asimov |
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4f9a5c6
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People think of education as something that they can finish. And what's more, when they finish, it's a rite of passage. You're finished with school. You're no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that's kid's stuff. Now you're an adult, you don't do that sort of thing any more.
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learning
lifetime
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Isaac Asimov |
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1834a42
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People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment.
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justice
expectations
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Isaac Asimov |
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2ee5e3c
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It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to..
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Isaac Asimov |
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d93e902
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Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.
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Isaac Asimov |
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29914d2
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It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!
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Isaac Asimov |
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a3aba7e
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Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.
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Isaac Asimov |
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35ee35c
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Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.
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Isaac Asimov |
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aa674f3
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Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.
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Isaac Asimov |
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134918b
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It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.
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Isaac Asimov |
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228a8b7
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A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.
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Isaac Asimov |
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728d767
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Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me." -I did nothing for you." -You loved me and your love made me--human."
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human
robot
foundation
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Isaac Asimov |
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872a47e
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All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.
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Isaac Asimov |
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876e9bf
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you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.
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Isaac Asimov |
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7a97491
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You are the only one responsible for your own wants.
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Isaac Asimov |
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fea325f
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Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]"
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love
last-words
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Isaac Asimov |
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1155952
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The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday's love is part of today's and the confidence in tomorrow's love is also part of today's. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die -- I almost believe, rationalist though I am -- that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once i..
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Isaac Asimov |
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8e70947
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Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.
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Isaac Asimov |
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3cc3e47
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In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.
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Isaac Asimov |
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17a1c5b
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It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
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society
technology
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Isaac Asimov |
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fc40f56
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There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state.
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Isaac Asimov |
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f2d7fea
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There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.
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Isaac Asimov |
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daf48da
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Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.
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olivaw
robots
sci-fi
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Isaac Asimov |
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6f8fbbc
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And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer--by demonstration--would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by ste..
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Isaac Asimov |
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27bd878
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Past glories are poor feeding.
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Isaac Asimov |
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1378919
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The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.
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transcendentalism
simple-living
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Isaac Asimov |
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ee09ad7
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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.
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Isaac Asimov |
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211738d
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A circle has no end.
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geometry
riddles
paradox
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Isaac Asimov |
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34594a1
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people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don't know how to fix themselves.
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Isaac Asimov |
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504b362
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Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.
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Isaac Asimov |
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8692cb1
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Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?
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superstition
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Isaac Asimov |
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6b2281f
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The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity: The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations. The population must be in the billions (+-75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
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Isaac Asimov |
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8a54c31
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Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions--not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?
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truth
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Isaac Asimov |
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d0d40d4
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For a wise man, I have been told, once said, 'Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.' But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem.
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magnifico
praise
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Isaac Asimov |
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ebcfad3
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But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past--never on yourselves." His fists balled spasmodically. "It amounts to a diseased attitude--a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is..
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Isaac Asimov |
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79844df
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Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life---which is fundamentally dependent on light---to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.
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Isaac Asimov |
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e9e1b14
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I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source.
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Isaac Asimov |