John Brunner Quotes

“I was brought up as a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke.

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

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

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.

...what in God's name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

Get me a drink of water, please, and something to quiet my belly. It’s rumbling so much I can’t hear myself think.

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

One thing leads to another in this world, Flamen, and we human beings get dragged along like — like dead leaves spinning in the wake of a skimmer. Diablo was saying a while back how you fine down your principles so that a machine can handle them, and pretty soon the person using the machine comes to imagine that this is how it’s always been — there never was a subtler way of thinking. That’s some of where it’s at, but it’s not all by any means. Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don’t you — those steel bands spiked like an Iron Maiden? What’s the mentality of someone who’s prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he’s already insane when he commits himself to that course of action, and you don’t have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overdose of Ladromide before he stops thinking as a responsible mature person ought to! And what’s the reason that’s advanced for acting this way?” He rounded on Reedeth.
“You know! You probably have it dinned into you a dozen times a day at your work! ‘Be an individual!’” Conroy contrived to make the slogan sound obscene. “And what’s this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It’s no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people’s experience — you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we can bring any part of the world into our own
homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time we advertise goods people can’t afford, and anyhow they’ve got the color and hold controls adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you’ve bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it’ll go away!
“We mi

Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind?
Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species.
Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President.

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’ve been amazingly lucky, which is another way of saying we’ve kept our eyes and minds open and responded when something turned up.

Ah, go to hell!"
"That's a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.

I'm myself, not a label.

What are you going to do for a career?"

Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. "Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race.