Pain and suffering - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe - I have thought since - I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

- H. G.Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. [. . .] Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us.

- H. G.Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

''Human beings,'' said Tuffaron, familiarly known as the Mad Genii, ''are stupid and willful. They derive intense enjoyment from suffering or else they would not bend all their efforts toward suffering.''

- L. Ron Hubbard, ''Borrowed Glory'' (1941)

In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

I do not understand objections to ''cruel and unusual'' punishment.While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment - and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism?

- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959)

Pain is the only evil I know about. It's the only one I can fight.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Sometimes pain can drive a man harder than pleasure.

- Don Ingalls, ''The Alternative Factor,'' episode of Star Trek (1967)

He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.

- James Tiptree, Jr., ''Painwise'' (1972)

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice.We are brothers.We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

The best way of handling pain was to study it objectively.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

He enters pain's cold regions as an explorer, an objective visitor. It is a country of ice and glass, monochromatic plains and valleys filled with washblue shards of ice, crystal pyramids and pinnacles, squares, oblongs, and all manner of polyhedron - block upon block of painted blue pain.

- Jack Dann, ''Camps'' (1979)

Pain can be controlled, you just disconnect it.

- James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, The Terminator (film, 1984)

Who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Pain is the universe unguarded.

- Steve Aylett, ''Angel Dust''(1998)

The future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise, what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world, because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past.

- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5: In the Beginning (TV movie, 1998)

As a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

- AndyWachowski and LarryWachowski, The Matrix (film, 1999)