John Brunner Quotes

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

It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for.

Mother Superior couldn't be drearier! Life is oppressive and lonely and dun! Little Miss Celia envied Ophelia—Hamlet ignored her and then there was none! Rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. Penny a look, goobledegook, you can't live the life that you read in a book. Pouncing and bouncing hear what I'm announcing—it's true and you'll never hide from it. You may think you're knowing in coming and going but you can't take the 'come' out of 'comet.' As I was going down the drains I met a man with seven brains. Every brain had seven lives, every life had seven wives, every wife told seven lies, who will win the liars' prize?

His brief and frustrating dialogue with them had convinced him that they must divide the human race into three categories: staff, patients and potential patients.

She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to.

If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?

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.

It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.

It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs.

So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday.

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.“

Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!

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?

He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.

LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you musn’t,” and “I can but you musn’t.”