In 1968, gripped readers with a chilling work of dystopian fiction exploring the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The 1982 movie adaptation, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, changed the title to . Set in a postapocalyptic San Francisco, the story follows Rick Deckard, a "blade runner" tasked with "retiring" rogue androids built by the Tyrell Corporation. While tracking down these fugitive "replicants," Deckard confronts the blurred lines between humanity and human-like machines. His journey intertwines with those of several replicants, including the enigmatic Roy Batty and the vulnerable Rachael, implanted with memories belonging to Eldon Tyrell's niece. Characters like genetic designer J. F. Sebastian and replicant eye specialist Hannibal Chew further complicate Deckard's emotional responses and perceptions.
As the world grapples with the rise of AI, this sci-fi novel points to the extraordinary things that define our humanity, even in the face of new life and off-world commerce. Here are 30 Blade Runner quotes that reflect on human emotions, existence, and the complexities of technology.
The best Blade Runner quotes on human emotions
"Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida."
"Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.
"…the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated."
"'I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.'"
"Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating."
"My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression."
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
The best Blade Runner quotes on existence
"Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked."
"'Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'"
"Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment."
"I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed…"
"But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth."
"The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are."
"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity."
"Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world."
"The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete."
"It's not an easy thing to meet your maker."
The best Blade Runner quotes on society and AI
"But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect."
"Emigrate or degenerate. The choice is yours!"
"It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity."
"You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all."
"You can't go from people to nonpeople."
"Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know."
"'Then,' Miss Luft said, 'you must be an android.'"
"Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator."
"'I can't stand the way you androids give up,' he said savagely."
"'An android,' he said, 'doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for.'"
The best Blade Runner quotes on personal reflections
"I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile."
"Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one."
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."