Babies, bathwater, balconies

The best line from the whole book:
“No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to use one of your ancient clichés,” Erasmus said. “I threw a baby off a balcony once. The consequences were extreme.”
From: “Sandworms of Dune,” by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson; pg. 500.
Okay, so I suppose I should give a bit of context… Erasmus is a “thinking machine,” or an Artificial Intelligence, so “emotion” isn’t one of its/his stronger attributes. I was reading along and hit this and just cracked up.