Upstart English Tuition > Upstart's Quotes

“you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That’s Rule Three to a robot. Also every ‘good’ human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom—even when they interfere with his comfort or his safety. That’s Rule Two to a robot. Also, every ‘good’ human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That’s Rule One to a robot. To put it simply—if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
― George Orwell

“The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.”
― Charles Dickens

“The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.”
― Charles Dickens

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.”
― Dickens, Charles

“[S]ome score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be --- as here they are --- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ....”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a will and the trusts under a will — or it was once. It’s about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The horror! The horror!”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The streets were dark with something more than night.”
― Raymond Chandler

“You're broke, eh?"
I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.”
― Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life

“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye