topic: what are people like?

• a.i.: artificial intelligence
  • When abandoning David, being convinced he is a danger to her son, she wants him to be safe, but knows she can't keep him despite her love for him.
  • "But in the beginning, didn't God create Adam to love him?" (Professor Hobby on the morality of making a robot love a human)
  • "She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you David, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a dog, a cat, or a canary. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. 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, and that is why you must stay here, with me." Gigolo Joe
  • "I can't accept this! There is no substitute for you own child!" Monica
  • "My mommy doesn't hate me! Because I'm special! And unique! Because there's never been anyone like me before, ever! Mommy loves Martin because he is real, and when I am real Mommy's going to read to me and tuck me in my bed and sing to me and listen to what I say and she will cuddle with me and tell me every day a hundred times a day that she loves me!" (David)
  • "The greatest single human gift - the ability to chase down our dreams." (Professor Hobby)
  • "David, I often felt a sort of envy of human beings, of that thing they call 'spirit'. Human beings have created a million explanations of the meaning of life- in art, in poetry, and mathematical formulas. Certainly human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence. But human beings no longer existed. So, we began a project- that would make it possible to recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA in a fragment of bone or mummified skin. We also wondered would it be possible to retrieve a memory trace in resonance with a recreated body. And you know what we found? We found the very fabric of space/time itself appeared to store information about every event which had ever occurred in the past. But the experiment was a failure. For those who were resurrected only lived through a single day of renewed life. When the resurectees fell asleep on the night of their first new day they died, again. As soon as they became unconscious, their very existence faded away into darkness. So you see, David, the equations have shown that once an individual space/time part had been used it could not be reused. If we bring your mother back now it will only be for one day. And you will never be able to see her again." (Specialist - evolved mecha)
• do androids dream of electric sheep? read
  • She tells him that it is the “curse” upon those that are left on the earth that sometimes they have to do something wrong in order for something to be right. This is what happened to Mercer. Now, all he can do is “move along with life, going where it goes, to death.”
  • "Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right."
  • "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity."
  • "The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist."
  • "Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated."
  • "In front of him he distinguished a shadowy figure, motionless. 'Wilbur Mercer! Is that you?' My god, he realized; it's my shadow." (229) | This quote is from the novels climactic scene in which Rick finds full fusion with the religious messiah figure of Mercer. Rick discovers that what Mercer represents is not simply a religion of distraction, but a path towards the survival of humanity in the shared suffering of the collective. This fusion allows Rick to regain the empathetic ability he had lost by killing all the Nexus-6 androids.
  • "...ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated." (29) | This quote illustrates the binary oppositions that Dick attempts to first frame, then to tear apart. In this quote, Rick Deckard ponders the vague lines drawn between those creatures that are empathetic and those things which do not have that ability. One of the novel's major themes revolves around the question of what traits make something human and what trait ensures survival or defeat.
  • "The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are." (239) | This quote is spoken by Rick after Iran finds the mechanical panel on the toad that Rick believed was real. Rick is resigned to the falseness of the animal, but his new found empathetic capacity allows him to begin to appreciate even this form of false life. Before, he had loathed his electric sheep. Now, however, he is able to see the value in even a "paltry" life.
  • "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity." (177) | This quote is spoken by Mercer as he tells Rick that he must go on and complete the mission of killing the Nexus-6 androids. Rick believes that he must quit killing them because of his new found empathy towards androids, but Mercer tells him that life requires many things which will cause him do things he thinks are wrong. This teaching from Mercer blurs the lines between the novel's morality and shows that empathy is not always an emotion that creates only good.
  • "An android doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for." (99) | This quote is spoken by Rick as he interrogates Luba Luft to determine if she is an android. This quote is ironic because, as it turns out, some androids do care what happens to other androids, perhaps even more than they care about what happens to human life. It was these, supposedly, artificial bonds that kept the Nexus-6 androids together and made them fear for the safety of each other. In the end, if androids do care for other androids, it becomes impossible to tell who is really an android and who is not, just another of the book's twists in logic.
  • "… classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind." (14) | This quote expresses the fear that Rick Deckard and the other inhabitants of earth lived with and the reality for a mentally disabled person such as John Isidore. The radioactive dust caused many to become mentally deficient and this meant that they were treated as second class citizens. This quote illustrates the false structures of hierarchy that humanity set up for itself which allowed mentally deficient people and androids to be classed as less than human even when they showed more empathy and humanity than those that were superior to them.
  • "If I test out android," Phil Resch prattled, "you'll undergo renewed faith in the human race. But since it's not going to work out that way, I suggest you begin framing n ideology which will account for-" (138) | This quote, spoken to Rick by the bounty hunter Phil Resch, is said just before Rick administers a test on Phil to determine if the reason he is able to so coldly kill is because he is actually an android. If he is, this will validate Rick's belief that androids have no empathy for life and can become completely closed to all human emotion. However, as Rick discovers, humans have this same ability, blurring the distinction between what is real and what is not.
  • "Do androids dream? Rick asked himself." (182) | This quote reflects the title of the book and the basic philosophical question that the book asks: what qualities and traits makes one human. Roy Baty, Rick's shadow character, seems to have just as many dreams as Rick himself does; dreams for a better life and for the ability to have spiritual fusion with Mercer. Yet, Rick is sent to kill them as if they did not dream. This conflict frames the novel's debate over the value of life.
• the matrix
  • "You're looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did." (Trinity)
  • "We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun." (Morpheus)
  • "The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it... It is another training program designed to teach you one thing: if you are not one of us, you are one of them." (Morpheus)
  • "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." (Agent Smith)
  • "You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken." (Rhineheart)
  • "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." (Agent Smith)
  • "To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human." (Mouse)