John Brunner

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

Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“

If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal.

And what was this man Diablo like as a person, anyhow? As a public figure, anybody in communications of any kind had a preconceived image of him, a brilliant, savage, wholly destructive propagandist whose canned programs were seized with cries of delight in Africa and Asia. But that was essentially irrelevant. Back in the pioneering days of the media, almost immediately after the crude and primitive radio era dominated by Dr. Goebbels, that instinctive genius of the borderline period Joe McCarthy had allegedly greeted a former acquaintance at a party, having secured his dismissal from his job, the loss of most of his friends and the acquisition of several million new enemies, with the cry, “Haven’t seen much of you lately — you been avoiding me?

Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power.

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

I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I've done I've helped to nail a lie, and I'm coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them."
"I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders," Jogajong said. "It is what must be paid to buy what we want."
"What we've been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.

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.

Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.

We cannot allow quibbles to stand in the way of the truth.

I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did.

and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!

Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain.

Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote — I’d have cast a brick.

It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.