Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Atsuko Tanaka: Kusanagi Motoko

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Quotes 

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : You talk about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.

  Puppet Master : There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

• Puppet Master : I refer to myself as an intelligent life form because I am sentient and I am able to recognize my own existence, but in my present state I am still incomplete. I lack the most basic processes inherent in all living organisms: reproducing and dying.

  Major Motoko Kusanagi : But you can copy yourself.

  Puppet Master : A copy is just an identical image. There is the possibility that a single virus could destroy an entire set of systems and copies do not give rise to variety and originality. Life perpetuates itself through diversity and this includes the ability to sacrifice itself when necessary. Cells repeat the process of degeneration and regeneration until one day they die, obliterating an entire set of memory and information. Only genes remain. Why continually repeat this cycle? Simply to survive by avoiding the weaknesses of an unchanging system.

• Major Motoko Kusanagi , Puppet Master : When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways.

• [last lines] 

  Major Motoko Kusanagi , Puppet Master : And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : I mean, have you ever actually seen your brain?

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it's wired into the core of our being.

• Major Motoko Kusanagi : Just a whisper. I hear it in my ghost.