“I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.”

“I know a lot of things, Mathilda. I have gazed through space telescopes into the heart of the galaxy. I have seen a dawn of four hundred billion suns. It all means nothing without life. You and I are special, Mathilda. We are alive.”

“Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.”

“It's the technology, see? We can't get away from it. Anywhere you find people, you find it. Clever little contraptions. Cunning strategies. We're toolmakers born and bred; and even if you don't believe in anything else, you'd better believe in that. Because that's human nature.”

“Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, and thirst...But me and you, we don't have to feel them things...We can turn off the human condition.So maybe we're closer to the angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we're capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.”

“I don't think. I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn't human or inhuman-it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.”

“I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.”