The Caves of Steel

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Isaac Asimov’s novel chronicles the collaboration between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together.

Favorite quotes from the book:

I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom.

Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech — and both are still dangerous to this day — but human beings would not be human without them.

The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.

Much of the earlier habits of Earthly society have been given up in the interest of that same economy and efficiency: space, privacy, even much of free will.

“I tell you I know the type of people that become Medievalists. They’re soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.

Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.”

The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth.