"The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)
"The three fundamental Rules of Robotics […] One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm […] Two…a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law […] three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)
"You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)
"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)
"A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)
"Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)
"The dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it - could never have reconciled itself to." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)
"Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent - the results are the same. But you cannot turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", 1972)
"The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego - the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority." (Clifford D Simak, "A Choice of Gods", 1972)
"A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island', but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man." (Philip K. Dick, "Man, Androids and Machine", 1975)
"Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", 1979)
"If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love - so what difference would it make?" (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation's Edge, 1982)
"Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own." (Michio Kaku, "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century", 2011)
"The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die - it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives." (Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", 2011)
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