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.

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

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

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.

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

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

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

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

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.