Quotes / Human Resources

"We're running short on skin. We'll need to harvest more lesbians."

— Dr. Pretorious, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter

"SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!"

— Soylent Green

"For a thousand days the great barge of the Adeptus sailed towards Earth. In the thirteen holds, each as cavernous as a temple nave, our human cargo set up a great wailing and moaning. I counted twenty thousand souls bound for service. Men, women and children. Young and old. The sick and the sound. Only the children did not know or could not guess what lay at the journey's end. But I am a Psyker like them and I sensed their pain and felt their chains as if bound about my own body. Already I could taste the fear of the weak and knew what fate held for them. They would serve with their lives. The remainder would serve in their own way. Their powers would be trained to provide the Emperor's Pskyers, Astropaths, and thousands of other functionaries. But the decision was not mine to make, to separate those who would live from those who would die. I am a guardian of the Adeptus. Souls such as these I carry to the Emperor's table."

— Warhammer 40,000

Sweeney Todd: The history of the world, my love...
Mrs. Lovett: Save a lot of graves, do a lot of relatives favors...
Sweeney Todd: ...is those below serving those up above.
Mrs. Lovett: Everybody shaves, so there should be plenty of flavors...
Sweeney Todd: How gratifying for once to know...
Both: ...that those above will serve those down below!

— "A Little Priest", Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

"Need parts. Kill ze little one!"

— Scalpel, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen

Edgar: Mankind's a limited resource, after all.
Alpha Vampire: There are seven billion of them.
Edgar: Only seven.

— Supernatural, "There Will Be Blood"

"The Golgari have an important function in Ravnica. They take care of the dead, in their own way, and they provide food for the poor. What is that food made out of? That's not to ask. That's golgari business!"

— Brady Dommermuth, Golgari Swarm official video

Ghouls make excellent "clay" with which a neonate can master the fine art of Vicissitude. Of course, practice on ghouls means learning Vicissitude by the trial and error method: mistakes can be killed and/or sucked dry of blood, which makes for a quick and zesty midnight snack; minor blunders can also be quite literally tossed onto the pile to be later used in the creation of a vozhd. In many Tzimisce manses, promising Vicissitude students display their creations in the forms of porous skin wallpaper, internal-organ tapestries, intestinal lamps, and breathing, bone-constructed bric-a-brac.

— Vampire: The Masquerade — Ghouls: Fatal Attraction

"Don't worry about me gutting you like your friend. All I need from you is your head. I just pull out the skull, scrape the fat from the inside of the skin, and shrink the rest of it down for one of my dolls. These dolls are old. I'll be moving on soon, and I'll need new ones. You'll be the first in my new life. Try to relax. It'll hurt less if you're calm. Be good and I'll kill you quick with the gun."

— The Old Man, Ambitious Boys Like You, by Richard Kadrey

On the back of each livestock-boy, I see the scars. Long pinkish scars with little holes around the slits, where the stitches once were, after things had been taken out of their thin bodies for the sick. "Best meat in town," Weasel says to me, grinning. "They cook up lovely like. Thousand euro a kilo they cost. More than fruit in them tins, like. Think of that. More than fruit in tins."

— Doll Hands, by Adam L. G. Nevill

"She can't hear you, dear. I use a sleeping spell right up until I'm ready to put them in the press. You don't want too much panic; that sours things. It's the grief you need, the pain, and it's always best taken fresh. Giving them time to worry just makes things, well, stale and bitter. My, what a vintage you would have made when you were young, girl. What anguish, what unadulterated heartache! The loss of your father, everything you'd known overturned. What wouldn't I have done to take your tears... it's so much sweeter, a wine borne of deep sorrow."

— The Winemaker, Vigil, by Angela Slatter

Sebastian: To work with bone, you have to eat bone. After a while, the magic starts to collect in your system. Your body becomes a store of it. Which makes an osteomancer a resource that can be consumed.
Agnes: That's cannibalism. Have you—
Sebastian: Not yet. But my work's been noticed. There will be promotions. High-level osteomancers know about me. Maybe even the Hierarch himself.
Agnes: And you'll be expected to eat other osteomancers.

— The Wolf And The Manticore, by Greg Van Eekhout

"Grave-robbing had been rife in the distant past, magus bones looted for elixirs and sorcerous rituals, which is why cremation was now the ultimate destiny of all Gifted. Every living thing contained a small amount of magic in blood and bone, but every bit of a magus' body was so filled with magic that even our shite was a potent resource, the camber pots and privies in Arcanum buildings emptied out into special slurry pits whose reeking gunk was spread over the farmlands surrounding Setharis. The magic seeped into the land and fed the spirits of growth and plenty, producing crops resistant to drought, plague-spirits and insects, with yields so enormous that we were almost able to feed this ravenous dark city of ours without relying on imports."

— The Traitor God, by Cameron Johnston

"The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter for wombtanks but, most of all, for Soap. What more economic way to supply this protein than by recycling Fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover 'reclaimed proteins' are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp's dineries all over Nea So Copros."

— Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas

"I've got a whole lot of end-of-line stock."
The grafter smiles and slowly yawns open the fire exit door to reveal, crowded on the metal spiral stairs, a terrible tableau that will lodge in Eddie's permanent memory, nestling, as usual, in the worst possible location, among his top-of-the-line masturbatory fantasy images: a miserable group of wretches who are waiting to sell their body-parts. Eddie looks away, but not quickly enough. He can't avoid seeing the sodden bandages on recently-truncated limbs, the bloody off-white eye patches, the stomachs criss-crossed over major internal organs with hasty, inept stitching, the makeshift wheelchairs and carts, the jerry-built crutches, the pinned-back sleeves, the pinned-back sleeves and knotted spare trouser legs, and worst of all, the eager glints in the eyes of those who still have eyes.

— Colony

The Doctor: But what of the lesser intellects? Or will they be left to rot?
Davros: You should know me better than that, Doctor. I never waste a valuable commodity. The humanoid form makes an excellent concentrated protein. This part of the galaxy is developing quickly: famine was one of its major problems.
The Doctor: You've turned them into food?
Davros: A scheme that has earned me great acclaim.
The Doctor: But did you bother to tell anyone that they might be eating their own relatives?
Davros: Certainly not! That would have created what I believe is termed... "consumer resistance".

— Doctor Who, "Revelation of the Daleks"

Dalek Emperor: We waited here, in the dark space... damaged, but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity! The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed, they all came to us! The bodies were filleted... pulped... sifted! The seed of the human race is perverted! Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured.
Doctor: So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead.
Rose: That makes 'em... half-human!

— Doctor Who, "The Parting of the Ways"

It is a sad but inescapable fact that some are destined to simply fuel the ambitions of their betters.

— Flavor text for Processing, Stellaris

"What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being... [holds up a Duracell battery] ...into this."

— Morpheus, The Matrix

Coke? Coal? Petroleum? Alone they’ll never do
No, this engine sends the scent of rendered flesh out from the flue
On this service we’ll be serving something rather more unnerving
Chugga-chugging on blood as he chew-chews you
It’s all true, choo-choos consume fuel too
Humans are a whole new consumable and whole food
Gluten free range and more renewable than coal too
So, who to choose to chew to this tune? Ooh, you’ll do

— The Stupendium and Dan Bull, "The End of the Line"

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