All quotes

Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future.

Cooper: Hey, TARS, what's your honesty parameter? TARS: 90%. Cooper: 90%? TARS: Absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic, nor the safest form of communication with emotional beings.

Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it yet.

Murph: Why did you and Mom name me after something that's bad? Cooper: Well, we didn't. Murph: Murphy's Law? Cooper: Murphy's Law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. What it means is whatever can happen will happen.

This world's a treasure, Donald, but it's been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to die here.

CASE: It's not possible. Cooper: No… It's necessary.

Well, we used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you're there.

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is...the higher achievement.

Half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damn rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer…

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

Case: Are you sentient, or not? Dixie Flatline: Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess… But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI…

You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.

I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see...

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the…

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.