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Karel Čapek citations
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Karel Čapek , né le 9 janvier 1890 à Malé Svatoňovice dans la région de Hradec Králové en Bohême et mort le 25 décembre 1938 à Prague, est l'un des plus importants écrivains tchéques du XXe siècle. Le mot robot, qui apparaît pour la première fois dans sa pièce de théâtre de science-fiction R. U. R. en 1920, sous-titre en anglais du titre tchèque Rossumovi univerzální roboti, a été inventé par son frère Josef à partir du mot tchèque robota, qui signifie « travail » ou « servage ».

Dans une autre de ses œuvres, La Guerre des salamandres, Čapek peint avec un humour noir et joyeux la géopolitique de son temps et tourne notamment en dérision le national-socialisme. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. janvier 1890 – 25. décembre 1938
Karel Čapek photo
Karel Čapek: 51 citations0 J'aime

Karel Čapek: Citations en anglais

“I think I am slowly becoming an anarchist, that this is only another label for my privateness, and I think that you will understand this in the sense of being against collectivity.”

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Karel Čapek

Statement to S. K. Neumann, as quoted Karel Čapek: Life and Work (2002) by Ivan Klima

“The Continent is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier, more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic, vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect. Please, give me a ticket straight to the Continent.”

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Karel Čapek

Letters from England (1925)

“Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end … Art must not serve might.”

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Karel Čapek

Statement to S. K. Neumann, as quoted Karel Čapek: Life and Work (2002) by Ivan Klima

“Why are there stars when there are no people? O God, why don't you just extinguish them? — Cool my brow, ancient night! Divine and fair as you always were — O night, what purpose do you serve? There are no lovers, no dreams. O nursemaid, dead as a sleep without dreams, you no longer hallow anyone's prayers. O mother of us all, you don't bless a single heart smitten with love. There is no love.”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with — no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do.”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“At the Petrin telegraph station, religion broke out like an epidemic. For no earthly reason, all the telegraph operators on duty were sending out ecstatic messages to the whole world, a sort of new gospel saying that God is coming back down to earth to redeem it …”

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Karel Čapek livre The Absolute at Large

The Absolute at Large (1921)

“"Figh-ting in the Bal-kans." Lord Jesus, another of God's punishments! But that war'll get here too! Is it far from here?”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“We've become beings with souls… Something struggles within us. There are moments when something gets into us. Thoughts come to us which are not our own… People are our fathers! The voice that cries out that you want to live; the voice that complains; the voice that reasons; the voice that speaks of eternity — that is their voice!”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.”

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Karel Čapek

Letters from England (1925)

“You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.”

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Karel Čapek livre The Absolute at Large

The Absolute at Large (1921)

“Within the next ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There'll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there'll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves… But before that some awful things may happen, Miss Glory. That just can't be avoided. But then the subjugation of man by man and the slavery of man to matter will cease. Never again will anyone pay for his bread with hatred and his life. There'll be no more laborers, no more secretaries. No one will have to mine coal or slave over someone else's machines. No longer will man need to destroy his soul doing work that he hates.”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Robots of the world! Many people have fallen. By seizing the factory we have become the masters of everything. The age of mankind is over. A new world has begun! The rule of Robots!”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“O nature, nature, life will not perish! Friends, Helena, life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds. Now let Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, for my eyes have beheld — beheld Thy deliverance through love, and life shall not perish!”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Oh man, at that end not much has been left of your excellence, nothing of all that you have been boasting about through life - only sex, fear, self-admiration and a few other things you are usually ashamed of.”

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Karel Čapek

"Last Things of Man" (Stories from the Second Pocket, 1932)

“A guilty party is being sought. Such action is a favorite means of consolation in the face of calamity.”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Everything is done for! All of humanity! The whole world!. … Look, look, streams of blood on every doorstep! Streams of blood from every house! Oh, God, God, who's responsible for this?”

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Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“The only perfection which modern civilisation achieves is mechanical; machines are magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is served by them isn't magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more comely.”

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Karel Čapek

Letters from England (1925)

“Each of us is we.”

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Karel Čapek

An Ordinary Life (1934), as quoted in Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader (1990), edited by Peter Kussi, p. 20

“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.”

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Karel Čapek

R.U.R. supplement in The Saturday Review (1923)

“Why are there stars when there are no people? O God, why don't you just extinguish them?”

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Karel Čapek

Cool my brow, ancient night! Divine and fair as you always were — O night, what purpose do you serve? There are no lovers, no dreams. O nursemaid, dead as a sleep without dreams, you no longer hallow anyone's prayers. O mother of us all, you don't bless a single heart smitten with love. There is no love.
R.U.R. (1920)

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