Quotes About Dystopia

Whenever I watch 'The Matrix,' I think that it is possible, but I don't think that it's going to be machines enslaving humans.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.

I think of dystopian as 'Mad Max,' as 'Book of Eli,' as the world is ending.

So much of 'Doomsday' is taken from the early 'Mad Max' films.

A Scanner Darkly' is one of Dick's bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.

I always wanted to do a sci-fi movie, but most sci-fi scripts are either about saving the planet or fighting aliens.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

The world of 'The Hunger Games' is a paranoid survivalist's dream.

Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip.

We are both disturbed and fascinated by visions of bleak futures, predictions of what might come if we as a society aren't careful.

Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.

We're not going to get the jack-booted thugs stomping on a human face that you get in '1984' but we might get the 'Brave New World' where the biggest problem there is how to deal with the fact that everyone is so happy...[W]hat we're going to get is a nanny-type of fascism, if we get one at all...[S]imply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

The best reason to think that there could be a better future is the fact that we know just how bad the future could be.

Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on

I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right—the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven't experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn. The

Are there labor camps here?" he asked. "No," she said. "Mandatory marriages, forced-criticism sessions, loudspeaker?" She shook her head. "Then I'm not sure I could ever feel free here," he said.

You're right,' I'd say. 'The planet is grossly overpopulated and we'd better do something about it. Do you want to machine-gun the surplus yourself, or shall we start with you?

What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.

'Westworld' is bizarre. I don't know what to think of 'Westworld.'

'Blade Runner' is one of my favorite films.

The future is kind of a bleak place.

Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you'd be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with 'Blade Runner,' the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Do you ever read any of the books you burn? He laughed. That's against the law! Oh. Of course.