Foundation

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

A nuclear blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways

Sutt raised his eyebrows skeptically and took advantage of the pause. “I hope I am not of subnormal intelligence, but the fact is that your vague lecture isn’t very illuminating.”

From her waist as a source she was drowned in a pale, streaming luminescence of shifting color that drew itself over her head in a flashing coronet of liquid fire. It was as if someone had torn the aurora borealis out of the sky and molded it into a cloak.

The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

Hardin turned about in his chair to face the soldiers and smiled. One aimed his nuclear blast and then lowered it. The others never budged. Salvor Hardin, mayor of Terminus, surrounded by that soft aura, smiling so confidently, and before whom all the power of Anacreon had crumbled to powder, was too much for them, despite the orders of the shrieking maniac just beyond.

when the palace’s ballroom filled itself with a glittering horde of the kingdom’s very highest and most exalted nobility, he found himself hugging the wall, little noticed or totally ignored.

“Good-by, Lee. I hate to leave you in the frying pan like this, but there’s not another I can trust. Now please keep out of the fire.”

“Don’t worry. The frying pan is hot enough. I’ll follow orders.”

Religion is one of the great civilizing influences of history

He became acutely conscious of the fact that Wienis and his two arrogant sons were at present next in line to the throne.

But he was king. And kings could order people executed.

Even uncles and cousins.