list comprehension question

[Laura Creighton]

It wasn't the Robot books where I was thiking of looking, but a different
short story.  I actually believe that apologies are something which
are necessary due to one's-own need to behave rightly, rather than
somebody else's need to receive redress.  A society with both
Asimov-type robots and small children needs to do something
about the small child's propensity to order the robot to go jump
out the space station airlock.  When Mom says 'decent children don't
order robots to do foolish things' she can't make an appeal to the
robot's feelings, but to other things such as the anti-socialness
of waste.  Once such considerations come into play, the social value
of apologising needs examination -- and certainly, in a society which
is not based on enslavement, there is no room for somebody who is
'too big to apologise'.  People who regularily avoid apologising when 
they know perfectly well that they are in the wrong need to do so far
more for themselves than for other people.  That is trying to opt in and
out of society whenever it suits you.

Now I remember reading this and thinking this was pretty powerful stuff
when I was 14 or so.  And nun-dominated boarding school, where I escaped
classes that I was not interested in taking by illegally clibing trees,
reading books where I could not be found since 'tree-climbing' was so
much more forbidden than cutting physical educaiton classes that nobody
thought to look for me in the trees.  I'd sit in the top and watch them
seek and call for me at ground level.

Since thoughts that 'leopards kill their prey by dropping on them out
of trees' featured hightly in my thoughts at such a time, the discovery
that I might be damaging myself by opting out of society hit rather hard.
And I believed that it was Asimov who mentioned that -- until today.  It
doesn't sound like him.  It sounds more like Heinlein, but the Heinlein
fans have posted every satement he has ever written to the net, so if
I can't find it there, it is almost certainly not from Heinlein.  (He
does state this:

  In a family argument, if it turns out you are right - apologize at once!

But it is doubtful that this quote would have had such an effect on me,
my status as 'woefully misunderstood intellectual' was running at an
all time high then.  But figuring out if I wanted to reject all of society
or only my status as child within it was a nice problem.  And, arrogant
worm that I was, I took great comfort in the fact that all the people whom
I felt owed me apologies, (and there was quite a list) were secretly
damaging themselves in nasty permanent ways.  It was only much later
that I was able to connect their ability to treat me and the other children
so cruelly with the sort of damaging they were doing by not apologising.

However, all of this would only have been funny if the quote about half
of the apologising being for yoruself was from Asimov.  In usenet fashion
I will find the answer to who wrote this about 20 minutes after I post this.

Laura