Epigrams
Salvor Hardin was well known in the Foundation for his epigrams, which recur throughout the series, including:
- "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety".
- "Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound like it was."
- "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
His best-known maxim, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", became one of Isaac Asimov's favorite sayings.
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Famous quotes containing the word epigrams:
“If true that notion, which but few contest,
That in the way of wit short things are best,
Then in good epigrams two virtues meet,
For ‘tis their glory to be short and sweet.”
—Anonymous. From A Collection of Epigrams (1727)
“I change, and so do women too;
But I reflect—which women seldom do.
Tobacco is a filthy weed,
That from the devil doth proceed;
That drains your purse, that burns your clothes,
That makes a chimney of your nose.”
—Anonymous. “Written on a Looking Glass,” from Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber (1977)
“If anybody comes to I,
I physics, bleeds, and sweats’em;
If, after that, they like to die,
Why, what care I, I lets ‘em.”
—Anonymous. “On Dr. Lettsom,” from Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs (1977)