“La historia no se hace con grandes sueños sino con las insignificantes necesidades de todas las gentes honradas, moderadamente maliciosas y que se buscan a sí mismas.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“It's astonishing what a number of churches and idiots there are in the world.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“Nobody can hate man more than man.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“But old Rossum meant it literally.
He wanted to become a sort of scientific substitute for God. He was a fearful materialist, and that's why he did it all. His sole purpose was nothing more nor less than to prove that God was no longer necessary.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“Dr Gall: Hoši, je to zločin staré Evropy, že naučila Roboty válčit! Nemohli už dát, u čerta, pokoj s tou svou politikou? To byl zločin, udělat z živé práce vojáky!
Alquist: Zločin byl vyrábět Roboty!
Domin: Cože?
Alquist: Zločin byl vyrábět Roboty!
Domin: Ne. Alquiste, ani dnes toho nelituju.
Alquist: Ani dnes?
Domin: Ani dnes, v poslední den civilizace. Byla to veliká věc.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“but within the next ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“nothing is stranger to man than his own image”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“Helena: Will they be happier when they can feel pain?
Dr. Gall: On the contrary. But they will be technically more perfect.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“To think the way you do, you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.
On both perhaps.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death
“Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it.”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge
“And I think that if you are lucky enough to give and receive love, then you can be happy in the face of suffering. I was talking to a friend about this and we decided that maybe heaven is just that...love. And that heaven exists on a day-to-day basis within people. When they give and receive love, that's a little slice of heaven.”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding
“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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