Robots, androids, and cyborgs - 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!

The old crank actually wanted to make people. [. . .] Hewanted to become a sort of scientific substitute for God, you know. He was a fearful materialist, and that's why he did it all. His sole purpose was nothing more or less than to supply proof that Providence was no longer necessary.

- Karel Capek, R.U.R. (play, 1921), translated by P. Selver (1923)

It was a thing of glistening levers and bell cranks, of flexible shafting, cams, and delicate mechanical fingers, of vacuum tubes and photo-electric cells, of relays that clicked in ordered sequence when called upon to perform their myriad functions of pumps, tanks, condensers, reactances, microphones, and loud-speakers. A robot, created by the master scientists of the twenty-third century.

- Harl Vincent, ''Rex'' (1934)

Robots by their very nature are lazy, since they lack the fierce incentives thrust by Nature on the more frail and ephemeral mortal humans.

- Malcolm Jameson, ''Pride'' (1942)

The robots worked untiringly, directing the destinies of mankind.

- Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, ''Open Secret'' (1943)

It was a voice speaking out of a place where no emotion, as humanity knew the word, had ever existed. It came from a brain as alien and incomprehensible as darkness in a world of eternal light; a brain no human could ever touch or understand, except to feel the cold weight of its strength and cower as a beast cowers before the terrible mystery of fire. ''Sleep,'' said the android. ''Sleep, and listen to my voice.''

- Leigh Brackett, ''The Jewel of Bas'' (1944)

It must be that robots predated all other life. It's the only logical conclusion.

- A. E. van Vogt, ''Final Command'' (1949)

[Words to activate the robot Gort:] Klaatu barada nikto.

- Edmund H. North, The Day the Earth Stood Still (film, 1951)

That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot.

- Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes (1963), translated by Xan Fielding (1963)

Robot: I do not vote. I am not programmed for free choice.

- Norman Lessing, ''Island in the Sky,'' episode of Lost in Space (1965)

He raised the steering wheel and pulled into the parking dome, stepped out onto the ramp and left the car to the parking unit, receiving his ticket from the box-headed robot which took its solemn revenge on mankind by sticking forth a cardboard tongue at everyone it served.

- Roger Zelazny, ''HeWho Shapes'' (1965)

Still, Candy told herself, robots can't feel.

- Fritz Leiber, ''The Crystal Prison'' (1966)

As we were made more efficient, we naturally were made more human, because the human body and brain are still the most efficient machines there are. You might almost say that, while you folks were becoming more and more false-toothed and nose-jobbed and bustplastied, and more and more warped and mutated by radiation, more and more dehumanized, we androids were becoming more and more human. Kind of ironic.

- Ray Russell, ''The Better Man'' (1966)

A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that's why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

The dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it - could never have reconciled itself to. ''I can't stand the way you androids give up,'' he said savagely.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Robots are nice to work with. They mind their own business, and they never have anything to say.

- Roger Zelazny, ''Dismal Light'' (1968)

Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men - and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness - the first immortal midway between two orders of creation. He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new - between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.

- Arthur C. Clarke, ''A Meeting with Medusa'' (1971)

Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one's knowledge or consent - the results are the same. But you cannot turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person's response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form.

- Philip K. Dick, ''The Android and the Human'' (1972)

Robotics is not an exact art.

- Isaac Asimov, ''The Bicentennial Man'' (1976)

''How can they fear robots?'' ''It's a disease of mankind, one which has not yet been cured.''

- Isaac Asimov, ''The Bicentennial Man'' (1976)

Marvin the Paranoid Android: In the beginning I was made. I didn't ask to be made, no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don't think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings, but if it brought some passing sadistic pleasure to some mentally benighted humans as they pranced their haphazard way through life's mournful jungle then so be it.

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Twelfth,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1980)

It had the shape of a man, the brain of an electronic devil.

- Fred Saberhagen, ''Adventure of the Metal Murderer'' (1980)

I read some classic stories about humanoid robots. They were charming stories and many of them hinged on something called the laws of robotics, the key notion of which was that these robots had built into them an operational rule that kept them from harming human beings either directly or through inaction. It was a wonderful basis for fiction . . . but, in practice, how could you do it? What can make a self-aware, nonhuman, intelligent organism - electronic or organic - loyal to human beings?

- Robert A. Heinlein, Friday (1982)

C3P0: It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

- Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, Return of the Jedi (film, 1983)

The Terminator: I'll be back!

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

Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

- Donna Haraway, ''A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s'' (1985)

They made us too smart, too quick, and too many.We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left . . . is us. That's why they hate us.

- Steven Spielberg, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (film, 2001)