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Robots and Empire
Isaac Asimov
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.”
“The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives—past and present and to come—forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you.”
“No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.”
“Changelessness is decay." "A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse." "Changelessness is a change for the worse”
“An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?”
“It lasted for a long time, I believe." "A very long time. It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end.”
“I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.”
“I have made a discovery,' said Giskard, his voice carrying no shade of emotion. 'I have made it because, for the first time in my existence, I faced thousands of human beings. Had I done this two centuries ago, I would have made the discovery then. Had I never faced so many at once, then I would never have made the discovery at all. 'Consider, then, how many vital points I might easily grasp, but never have and never will, simply because the proper conditions for it will never come my way. I remain ignorant except where circumstance helps me, and I cannot count on circumstance.”
“Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.' R. Giskard Reventlov”
“Yet weren't all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?]”
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Book Keywords:
daneel, decadence, death, thought-provoking, robots, inspirational, success, psychohistory, all-good-things-come-to-an-end, pain, progress, elijah, asimov, mortality, empire, humanity, giskard, complacency, immortality, kelden-amadiro, science-fiction, vasilia-aliena, longevity