The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the Ideal made eternal prisoner / l'Andréïde, avons-nous dit, n'est que les premières heures de l'Amour immobilisées, l'heure de l'Idéal à jamais faite prisonnière
This spectral vision could cloud my eyes, my senses, my soul; but could I ever forget that she is nothing personal? My self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero? / Vous pourrez troubler mes yeux, mes sens et mon esprit par cette magique vision: mais pourrai-je oublier, moi, qu'elle n'est qu'impersonnelle? Comment aimer zéro? me crie, froidement, ma conscience.
Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam; L'Eve Future, 1886
That's all it is: information. Even a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy. Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket.
If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems, and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.
Who can gaze into the mirror without becoming evil? The mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it.
>> Batou x 2, Major Motoko Kusanagi / Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2 / 1995, 2004
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
>> Arthur Koestler / The Ghost in the Machine / 1967
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
>> Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil; Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886
