I, Robot Foolishness and Folly Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Story title.paragraph)

Quote #4

"Call it intuition. That's all it is so far. But I intend to reason it out, though. A chain of valid reasoning can end only with the determination of truth, and I'll stick till I get there." (Reason.11)

Why is Cutie being foolish here? The big reason is that he ignores the evidence and is only interested in reason. (Which is to say, he's not very scientific about the issue.) But the other reason why we call him foolish is that he starts from a position that has nothing to do with reason; after all, "intuition" is almost the opposite of reason.

Quote #5

Donovan was back with the suits, "They've gone jingo on us, Greg. That's a military march." (Catch that Rabbit.69)

OK, we included something like this under the section on fear but we had to include it under Foolishness as well. Because, honestly, how does Donovan get from "military march" to "robot rebellion"? We mean, not everyone who wears a uniform is a soldier and not everyone who marches is a soldier. Usually, you know who the enemy soldiers are because they're the ones shooting at you. In other words, Donovan is getting worried about the totally wrong thing here.

Quote #6

"There's irony in three of the greatest experts in robotics in the world falling into the same elementary trap, isn't there?" (Liar.216)

"Liar!" may be one of our favorite stories because everyone looks bad in it: Milton Ashe doesn't realize how he's hurting Calvin; Bogert and Lanning don't realize what Herbie is doing; and Herbie can't figure out that what he's doing is going to cause more harm. But Calvin probably ends up looking the most foolish because she's so close to getting it, like when she notes that she always used to pretend that Ashe's girlfriend was his cousin, which was just what Herbie told her (77-8). Of course, she figures it out first, and that's why we love her also—most foolish but also smartest scientist in the room.