You wash your hands, don't you?" Bayley's eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. "Yes," he said. "All right. I suppose it's a me… - Isaac Asimov

"Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?"
"From you, Pappa", I said.
"From me? I don't know any of this".
"You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.

He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a phenomenon one did not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump remained, and would probably remain forever, the only practical method of travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.

Truth is a discredited commodity among diplomats.