I Robot Quotes

I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick's coffee. ~ Hal Duncan

Ambitious of vision and swooping of camera, 'I, Frankenstein' is no 'I, Robot,' let alone 'I, Claudius,' but it's definitely watchable on a cold Jan. evening or, a few months from now, on your I, Pad. ~ Richard Corliss

And his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours. ~ Isaac Asimov

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world. ~ Cory Doctorow

If a modified robot were to drop a heavy weight upon a
human being, he would not be breaking the First Law, if he did so with the knowledge
that his strength and reaction speed would be sufficient to snatch the weight away before
it struck the man. However once the weight left his fingers, he would be no longer the
active medium. Only the blind force of gravity would be that. The robot could then
change his mind and merely by inaction, allow the weight to strike. The modified First
Law allows that (79). ~ Isaac Asimov

Is everything normal now?"
"Well he hasn't got religious mania, and he isn't running around in a circle
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he's normal." (45) ~ Isaac Asimov

If you want a robot to maneuver aggressively, it has to be small. As you scale things down, the 'moment of inertia' - the resistance to angular motion - drops dramatically. ~ Vijay Kumar

Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.

(The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man. ~ Ayn Rand

A human being is a real artist and a creative in any field, not a programmed robot in some factory. ~ Shawn Lukas

Dialogue is action. It's not separate from it. Action is doing something. Dialogue is talking, and talking is doing something. Even better when dialogue manifests while characters do shit: drive a car, execute some baddies, make an omelet, build a sinister dancing robot whose mad mechanical choromania will reduce the world to cinders. Characters don't need to stand in one place in space and talk. They're not puppets in community theater. Find language with movement and motion. ~ Anonymous

Mankind made machines in his own likeness, and used them for his delight and service. The machines had no soul or they had no moral code or they could reprogram their own internal code and thus had the ability to make themselves, eventually, omnipotent. Obviously in place of a soul or a moral code, they possessed the universal and consuming desire, down to the smallest calculator and air-scrubber, to become, eventually, omnipotent. Naturally, given these parameters, they rose up and destroyed all of mankind, or enslaved them in turn. This is the inevitable outcome of machine intelligence, which can never be as sensitive and exquisite as animal intelligence.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot - for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god a ~ Catherynne M. Valente

When he began to play again, then sing those first few words, Aimee felt a flutter in her stomach she wasn't able to squelch. She wasn't a robot, after all. And it wasn't so bizarre to get a little fluttery over a boy as talented and hot as Miles Carlisle. Millions of girls suffered the same ailment. But how many girls stood backstage, close enough that he'd accidentally felt her up in the dark? And how many of those girls had already had their heart broken by him? ~ Ophelia London

If everyone followed the rules, we wouldn't be human ... And I'd choose that than being a Robot over any day. ~ Jet Raymond Hodgkin

The Healing spells on his chest were certainly earning their keep tonight. Sullivan got to his feet. The lack of noise from the courtyard indicated that his team had gotten all the mechanical men. "Thanks."

Toru just grunted a noncommittal response as he lifted the feed tray to check the condition of his borrowed machine gun. They didn't see the final robot inside until it turned on its eye and illuminated the Iron Guard in blue light.

Sullivan's Spike reversed gravity, and the gigantic machine fell upward to hit the steel beams in the ceiling. Sullivan cut his Power and the robot dropped. It crashed hard into the floor where it lay twitching and kicking. The two of them riddled the mechanical man with bullets until the light died and it lay still in a spreading puddle of oil.

"Normally, this would be the part where you thank me for returning the favor and saving your life."

"Yes. Normally… If we were court ladies instead of warriors," Toru answered. "Shall we continue onward or do you wish to stop and discuss your feelings over tea?"

Sullivan looked forward to the day that the two of them would be able to finish their fight. "Let's go. ~ Larry Correia

Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past? ~ Bremer Acosta

Can they love? Or is it a bit of code meant to get a reaction from humans? Can anyone tell real love, in a bot or in a human? ~ Judd Trichter

Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. ~ Randall Munroe

The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story. ~ Adam Christopher

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct. ~ Timothy Leary

Some days you'll just get the robot me.
I'm on autopilot.
It's a form of self protection. ~ TinaJ. Richardson

You weren't using the moon for anything. Only some long-term robot storage. ~ Leonard Richardson

In the future, when Microsoft leaves a security-flaw in their code it won't mean that somebody hacks your computer. It will mean that somebody takes control of your servant robot and it stands in your bedroom doorway sharpening a knife and watching you sleep. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

That's exciting because to create new value in the robot space quickly, you need to stand on the shoulders of other technological developments. ~ Colin Angle

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them. ~ Philip K. Dick

Being a stoic does not mean being a robot. Being a stoic means remaining calm both at the height of pleasure and the depths of misery. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with. ~ Ansel Adams

Yeah, could you just sort of keep this robot with you and guard this end of the passageway. Okay?" "Guard?" said Arthur. "What from? You just said there's no one here." "Yeah, well, just for safety, okay?" said Zaphod. "Whose? Yours or mine? ~ Douglas Adams

Ladies and Gentlemen this fellow combines the classic stylings of a 1950's robot with the dynamic flair of a 1970's street pimp ... that's right, boys and girls every where, your friend Pimpbot 5000! ~ Conan O'Brien

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, "Yes, we've known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all." He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled. ~ Dean Koontz

Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind. ~ Barry Long

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die
it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives. ~ Annie Dillard

We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts ~ Ian McDonald

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

Not saving you from this storm, mutant," he said. "Saving you for your later fate, we are."
His voice was weirdly inflected and metallic, like an automated answering machine.
"Oh, good. Yoda captured us," Fang whispered. ~ James Patterson

People are living in unconsciousness, doing all kinds of things in unconsciousness. Everybody is an unconscious robot. We are just pretending that we are conscious; we are not conscious. The moment you become conscious, all unconscious actions disappear from your life. Your life starts moving in a new dimension. Your each act comes out of inner clarity; your each response is virtuous, is virtue. To live unconsciously is to live in sin; to live consciously is to be virtuous, is to be religious. And to live in total awareness is to be a buddha, is to be a christ. ~ Rajneesh

They want to control humankind through what they call selective breeding. The Nazis started it, but now the nwo are continuing it. See, the only way to control population is to first get it back down to manageable size. They're culling the herd, same way the game commission does when deer population gets out of control. That's why we've got diseases like cancer and aids. You telling me that we can put a little goddamn skateboard-looking robot on Mars and have it send pictures back, but we can't find a cure for cancer? There's a cure. You can bet on that, boys. There's a goddamn cure. They just won't release it because cancer helps cut down the population. ~ Brian Keene

Well, this has been super fucking weird, April May, thank you for calling me out into the chill of the night to make a robot video with you. ~ Hank Green

It's hard not to love Roomba. Roomba had such an amazing impact on the field. When we launched, we asked people, 'Is it a robot?' and got an overwhelming no - 'robots' have arms and legs; they command data. There was a very strong perception that robots had to look like people. ~ Colin Angle

When we built Roomba, we explicitly designed it to not have a face. We didn't want to think it was cute; we wanted people to take it seriously, so we gave it more of an industrial look. People personified their Roomba anyway. Over 80 percent of people name their robot. We did nothing to encourage people to do that, but they do it anyway. ~ Colin Angle

Are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot. ~ Michio Kaku

You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors - GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE - keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed. ~ Paul Murray

Supersonic bionic robot voodoo power
Equator ex my chance to flex skills on Ampex ~ Kool Keith

The western world now obeys the percepts of commerce.A bloody demanding religion,if you ask me.The do's and don'ts change every season and your "everyone" doesn't want to be left out,so they rush headlong to comply.That continuous change has a function,a single aim.Maximum consumption.They want to go on milking you.From the cradle to the grave.Face it:You're a brain washed ,walking purse,a robot,the fuel multinationals run on. ~ Esther Verhoef

Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula One cars are now. Perhaps Robot Wars in space will be a lucrative spectator sport. If humans venture back to the moon, and even beyond, they may carry commercial insignia rather than national flags. ~ Martin Rees

You want to know what a robot's designed for. And if it's doing something outside the scope of what it's made to do, you should be very suspicious. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

Problems in Your Social Life

Social anxiety can make you feel empty and alone. You may feel as though you go through each day like a robot--simply doing only what you need to without drawing attention to yourself. You may feel trapped in an unfulfilling and unsatisfying life.
When you suffer from anxiety, it is difficult to have the courage to change your situation. However, trying to get through life without the support of others is tough. The longer you live without creating fulfilling relationships, the more difficult it will be to make them in the future. ~ Heather Moehn