"Are you well, sir?" asked Giskard. It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no wo… - Isaac Asimov

La religión persa era dualista, esto es, pintaba un universo en el que había un principio del bien y otro del mal…
"Hasta el retorno del exilio, el judaísmo había tenido un solo dios, considerado el autor de todo, lo bueno y lo malo. Pero después del retorno surgió un espíritu del mal, Satán, palabra que en hebreo significa "el adversario". Satán, en eterna lucha con Dios, no aparece en los libros bíblicos, de la época del exilio o anteriores, pero comienza a aparecer en los libros escritos durante la dominación persa".

People think of education as something that they can finish. And what's more, when they finish, it's a rite of passage. You're finished with school. You're no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that's kid's stuff. Now you're an adult, you don't do that sort of thing any more.

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there's no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.

What's exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there's now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it's time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There's only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.

all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located - so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.