John Brunner Quotes

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about.

Let's all be different same as me.

"Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes."

There's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that.

I'm myself, not a label.

How right you are." She shivered. "Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs ... I don't know how they can stand it.

You know, that's what's wrong with us on the public level. We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better. Our society is hurtling in free fall toward heaven knows where,

Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME!

For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.

I just haven't been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can't be a simple one. When I told you you'd been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?

We cannot afford the luxury known as conscience. The enemy we are up against certainly doesn't have one, so we are obliged to be absolutely rational. Cruel, if you like. People of good will, tolerant, liberal, whatever term you care to use, have always labored under a disadvantage. Those in power, those who want to hold on to power whatever the cost, have one ultimate recourse. If all else fails, they are prepared to kill. This is not available to pacifists.

Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.

Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said.

Don't bother explaining - I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.

Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and then the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot.

We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.
We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God.

Christ, what an imagination I've got!

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

We are told that "the meek shall inherit the earth." It follows that the meek are chosen of God. I shall try to be meek, not because I want the earth - you can keep it, after the way you've fucked it around it's not worth having - but because I too should like to be chosen of God. QED.
Besides, I like animals better than you bastards.

Shit, I forgot. This time of the afternoon the bar's probably shut. Half the staff has gone sick again. Mono, I think. Well, let's go look anyway; we might be lucky. We can't go up to my room
it's full of bugs.'
Which kind?'
Both.

The real universe has a marvellous and unique quality, inasmuch as it and only it can take us completely by surprise.

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos ... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.

She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, 'I changed my mind about insects!

The gray-haired growser, who proved to be a lawyer, had made it clear how much he loathed the people who were, in his view, attempting to undermine the American Constitution by imposing a state religion - or possibly it was "religion state by state," for his argument grew more confused with each Martini he sank. At any rate he was noisily predicting that the result would be world domination by the Communist bloc because they would wind up with a monopoly of practical science while his own people would be reduced to praying, sticking pins in chance-opened Bibles, and casting lots to decide whose eldest son should be sacrificed to stave off disaster.

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?

To go faster you must slow down.

He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the ones worth having for your friends.

On balance, I would say that anybody who reminds our lords and masters that the computerized society is fragile ... has definitely done a service to the public at large.

the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better.

Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.

True, you're not a slave. You're worse off than that by a long, long way. You're a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren't fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can't pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.

Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash.

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods.

Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine ...
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.

Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.

UNFAIR :; Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage.

…as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. 'The subject exhibited a pain response.' But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ... ? Then you serve machines.

It's the beginning of wisdom when you admit you've gone astray.

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.

It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.

You don't bother to memorise the literature - you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.

It's the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else - morality, self-respect, honest friendship - they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they'll be trodden on.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

You don't have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.