John Brunner Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.

Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that's in short supply can't be carved up and shared without destroying it.

I can't see heaven but I credit hell I live in New York so I know it well. When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome God gave it up and He went home.

There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between "ideals," and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.

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

Let's all be different same as me.

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.

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

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

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?

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

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.

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.

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

How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?

to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other

Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.

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

Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

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.

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.

Christ, what an imagination I've got!

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

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

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

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

I'm myself, not a label.

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.

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

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.

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.

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

To go faster you must slow down.

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

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.