All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

With rebellion, awareness is born.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.

Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

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.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Well, it was healthy to miss once in a while. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance.

Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't believe in it at all.

It is because you yourself fear the propaganda created, after all, only by the stupidity of your own bigots.

There's nothing like deduction. We've determined everything about our problem but the solution.

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal, honor and court etiquette.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

There can never be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corrdiors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.

I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless.

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn't help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

Just you think first, and don't bother to speak afterward, either.

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.

Goodbye, friend Elijiah, and remember that, although people apply the phrase to Aurora, it is, from this point on, Earth itself that is the true World of the Dawn.

An atom blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.

The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke to them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

Nonsense. You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward.

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 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?

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.

First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause.

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

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.