John Brunner Quotes

only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.)

—What was I thinking earlier about lunatics making their own version of truth? Why specify lunatics?

Even with the advantage of a certain degree of historical perspective,
such as we might expect to enjoy from our standpoint a few decades later, it is by no means easy to define the reasons why late twentieth-century society underwent so violent a process of fragmentation following a relatively long period of consolidation and homogenization. Two factors render the analysis especially difficult: first, the human mind is not particularly well adapted to reconciling information from disparate sources (e.g. personal experience with the content of a school history-lesson, data from a printed page with those from a vuset), and the alleged simplistic linearity of the Gutenberg era — if it ever existed — came to an end before it had affected more than a minuscule proportion of the species; and second, the process is not merely still going on — it’s still accelerating.
“However, one can tentatively point to three major causes which, like tectonic events in the deep strata of the Earth’s crust, not only produce reverberations over enormous areas but actually create discontinuities sharp enough to be uniquely attributed: what one might call psychological landslides.
“By far the most striking of these three is the unforeseen rejection of rationality which has overtaken us. Perhaps one might argue that it was foreshadowed in such phenomena as the adoption by that technically brilliant sub-culture, the Nazis, of Rassenwissenschaft, Hoerbiger’s prescientific Welteislehre, and similar incongruous dogmas. However, it was not until about two generations later that the principle emerged in a fully rounded form, and it became clear that the dearest ambition of a very large number of our species was to abdicate the power of reason altogether: ideally, to enjoy the same kind of life as a laboratory rat with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of his brain, gladly starving within reach of food and water.

I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?

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.

"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."

That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man.

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

The wind was bad today. Hugh’s filtermask was used up, all clogged, and he didn’t have the seventy-five cents for another from a roadside dispenser, and anyway the quality of those things was lousy, didn’t even last the hour claimed for them.
Lousy . . .
Absently he scratched his crotch. He’d more or less got used to lice by now, of course; there just didn’t seem to be any way of avoiding them. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there’s none. If there is one try and find it, if there isn’t never mind it.
There must be a hell of a lot of evils in the world nowadays that there aren’t any remedies for. Anyway: what sun? He hadn’t seen the sun in fucking weeks.

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

intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.