Ebling Mis said unhurriedly, 'You know what I'm doing these days?' 'I have your reports here,' replied the mayor, with satisfaction, 'together with a… - Isaac Asimov

My parents, both of whom spoke Russian fluently, made no effort to teach me Russian, but insisted on my learning English as rapidly and as well as possible. They even set about learning English themselves, with reasonable, but limited, success.
In a way, I am sorry. It would have been good to know the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski. On the other hand, I would not have been willing to let anything get in the way of the complete mastery of English. Allow me my prejudice: surely there is no language more majestic than that of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, and if I am to have one language that I know as only a native can know it, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate that it is English.

Circulation ceases first at the outer edges. It will take a while yet for the decay to reach the heart. That is, the apparent, obvious-to-all decay, as distinct from the inner decay that is an old story of some fifteen centuries.' 'And so this Hari Seldon foresaw a Galaxy of uniform barbarism,' said Riose, good-humouredly. 'And what then, eh?' 'So he established two foundations at the extreme opposing ends of the Galaxy – Foundations of the best, and the youngest, and the strongest, there to breed, grow, and develop. The worlds on which they were placed were chosen carefully; as were the times and the surroundings. All was arranged in such a way that the future as foreseen by the unalterable mathematics of psycho-history would involve their early isolation from the main body of Imperial civilization and their gradual growth into the germs of the Second Galactic Empire – cutting an inevitable barbarian interregnum from thirty thousand years to scarcely a single thousand.

La violenza è l'ultimo rifugio degli incapaci.