History is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people, that is, of everyone. All our… - Karel Čapek

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History is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people, that is, of everyone. All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all these lofty things are worthless.

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About Karel Čapek

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.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Karel Capek
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Additional quotes by Karel Čapek

Helena: And then I thought that...if they were like us they would understand us and they wouldn’t hate us so — if they were only a little bit human!”
Domin: Oh Helena! No one can hate more than man hates man! Transform stones into people and they’ll stone us! But go on!

After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution. Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms. The word culture is senile and it makes us sick. Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them. We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism: we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance. There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity. We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry. In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans. A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its ri

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But in ten years’ time Rossum’s Universal Robots will be making so much wheat, so much material, so much of everything that nothing will cost anything. Everyone will be able to just take as much as he needs. Nobody will live in poverty. They won’t have jobs, that’s true, but that’s because there won’t be any jobs to do. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only the things they want to do, they can live their lives just so that they can make themselves perfect.

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