Mark Twain Quotes

While 'Iron Man' is tremendous fun, it's another reminder of the pressure on all of us to make ourselves increasingly perfect and a little less human. And that is something it is important to resist.

We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence.

I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence - a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity.

I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

The Cube is an imitation of life itself - or even an improvement on life.

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

Man is nature's sole mistake.

In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

I like Muhammad a lot, because he's like us more than anybody else. Jesus is just so exalted, and Buddha is just so exalted, it's almost beyond our reach. Muhammad is more human, more self-doubting, even self-tortured at times.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

It won’t be long before we all number synthetic creatures among our friends.

Confined to the use of his own physical power, man is one of the most helpless animals. In proportion to his size and requirements, he is unquestionably very weak and slow. But the superiority of his organism consists precisely in the aptitude of his brain and the fitness of his hands for the contrivance and use of mechanical devices, through which he may take from nature, by artifice, those forces in which he is naturally wanting

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

Aren't all people flawed?