It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body.

The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it.

Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.