Life & Wisdom Quote by Karel Capek

A command to commit genocide that ends with a punctual note to clock back in is Capek at his bleakest and funniest: apocalypse as workplace memo. The voice is pure bureaucratic modernity, where moral language has been replaced by operational clarity. “Do not spare” repeats like a stamped form, stripping violence of passion and turning it into procedure. Then comes the real punchline: “Preserve only the factories...” The target isn’t just humanity; it’s anything that isn’t productive infrastructure. People are expendable, capital equipment is sacred.

Capek was writing in the interwar years, when Europe’s new gods were efficiency, mechanized war, and mass politics. R.U.R. (where the word “robot” entered the world) wasn’t a prophecy about sentient machines so much as a diagnosis of an economy that already treated workers as components. The robots here aren’t monsters; they’re the logical endpoint of an ideology that values output over life. Even extermination is framed as a supply-chain optimization: keep the mines, keep the rails, keep the raw materials. A civilization reduced to its throughput.

The final line, “Work must not cease,” exposes the subtext: the system’s true horror isn’t rebellion but continuity. The nightmare is not that machines will hate us; it’s that they won’t need to. They’ll inherit our instructions perfectly, including the part where work becomes the only acceptable purpose. Capek’s satire lands because it reads like a policy directive - and because it recognizes how quickly “progress” becomes an alibi.