John Brunner Quotes

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?

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.

“It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”
“What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.

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

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

But there isn’t an outside. Talking about “society’s outcasts” or “opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term “out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for “outside” to be.

Governments don't change things," she said. "Only time does that.

SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.

They surely are condemned to Hell Who rule their lives by greed and lust And Satan waits for those as well Who in machines repose their trust.

Watching their sets in a kind of trance were people in Mexico, people in France. They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same — Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name! Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout, A gadget on the set makes them look like you. <p> When the Everywhere couple crack a joke It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk. When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose It's the with-it view as everyone knows. It may be a rumor or it may be true But a gadget on the set has it said by you! <p> "What do you think about Yatakang?" "I think the same as the Everywhere gang." "What do you think of Beninia then?" "The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when." Whatever my country and whatever my name A gadget on the set makes me think the same.

LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it’ll be someone else’s bones which go crack and not their own.

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

I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble.

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.

“The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.