Czech writer (1890–1938)
Karel Čapek (January 9, 1890 – December 25, 1938) was a Czech author and playwright, who introduced and made popular the word robot as a word for artificial human beings, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pen Names:
K. Č.
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B. Č.
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Karel Plocek
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Karel Vašek
Alternative Names:
Karel Capek
From Wikidata (CC0)
I don’t know whether we have souls or not; but there are immortal things within us, and one of them is this instinctive desire for justice. I’m no better than anyone else, but there is something within me that isn’t only mine, that doesn’t belong only to me — the notion of a more exacting and more powerful order. I know I’m saying this badly, but at that moment I understood what crime is and what is meant by an offense against God. You see, a person who’s been murdered is like a holy place that’s been violated and defiled.
I don't say that it is a bad or useless profession: but it isn't one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort — you don't even see it. But I'd like all the things I used to see to be in it: the ringing hammer-strokes of the smith and the colors of the whisping of the stone-mason, the bustling of the baker, the humility of the poor, and all the lusty strength and skill which men of towering stature put into their work before the astonished and fascinated eyes of a child.
Look, justice has to be as unquestioned as the multiplication tables. I don’t know if you could prove that every theft is wrong; but I can prove to you that every theft is against the law, because I can arrest you every time. If you scattered pearls in the street, then a policeman could give you a ticket for littering. But if you started performing miracles, we couldn’t stop you, unless we called it a public nuisance or unlawful public assembly. There must be some kind of breach of order for us to intervene.
Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere. Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees … Relativism is neither a method of fighting, nor a method of creating, for both of these are uncompromising and at times even ruthless; rather, it is a method of cognition. If one must fight or create, it is necessary that this be preceded by the broadest possible knowledge ... One of the worst muddles of this age is its confusing of the ideas behind combative and cognitive activity. Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it.
Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is — and that is the point I want to stress — that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word. . . I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible, and that is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a human truth is opposed to another human truth no less human, ideal against ideal, positive worth against worth no less positive, instead of the struggle being as we are so often told, one between noble truth and vile selfish error.