Quick Quotes 35: Cyborgs

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

--Donna J. Haraway

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
-- Donna J. Haraway

My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don't even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable...just fill in your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
--Andy Clark

I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

--Hye Yeon Nam

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Quick Quotes 34: Vampires

The vampire craze is kind of fascinating. We're interested in the idea of immorality and I think we're drawn to people or creatures who can give in to those base impulses and just be bad and not feel bad about it.
-- Benjamin Walker

I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call 'gateway books.' I just coined that term. I don't know if there's a thing called 'gateway books.'
-- Josh Radnor


Becoming a vampire is forever. You don't get to change your mind about it later. For me, I think that's one of the big drawbacks with anything that's permanent. How do you know how you're going to feel in five years or 10 years? Even with a tattoo.
-- Stephenie Meyer

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Quick Quotes 33: Isaac Asimov and robots

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
-- Isaac Asimov

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
-- Isaac Asimov

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
-- Isaac Asimov

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Quick Quotes 32: Monsters

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets. -- Jacques Derrida

People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. You know what a monster is... Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways... There are far, far worse things to be than a monster. -- Jim Butcher

Stop trying to throw logic at nightmares. Sometimes the monsters are real... Sometimes they're real and the only way to defeat them is to be the bigger monster. --  Laurell K. Hamilton

“CONTROL MYSELF?!! I'm a MONSTER! Monsters don't control themselves! That's the whole IDEA!”-- Jeff Smith