John Brunner Quotes

And how many problems have been solved to date?”
“We haven’t exterminated ourselves.”
“You claim credit for that? I knew you had gall, but this is fantastic!

And that’s another reason I detest Mogshack, by the way. I never knew him to try and wean a patient away from dependence on guns. Yet he has two, three thousand a year of the population of New York State through his hands. By this time, if he’d done his job properly, he’d have created a glut of second-hand weaponry and cooled the temperature in this city past the flashpoint.”
“Two or three thousand out of how many many million?” Flamen snapped.
“Out of how many who are unstable enough to lose their marbles and start shooting at random into the street?” Conroy countered. “You don’t start riots, I don’t start riots, the politically educated leaders of the X Patriots don’t start riots. Paranoids start riots and other people are tipped over the edge by contagious hysteria. Your typical insurrectionary sniper isn’t a revolutionary or a fanatic — he’s someone who’s so devoid of empathy he can treat the human beings below his window as moving targets conveniently offered for his skill. And by clever exploitation of the public’s insecurity the Gottschalks have managed to put over a gang of lies equating gunmanship with masculine potency, which do even more damage than Mogshack’s pernicious dogmas. Damn it, man: anyone who can treat another human being as an object for target practice is stuck even further back in the infantile stage than somebody who’s frightened to move on from the masturbation phase and go to bed with a girl! Do you own a gun?

What a wise man can do, that can’t be done by someone who’s merely clever, is make a right judgement in an unprecedented situation.
​

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

Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.

Eight or nine men were present

...is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ...Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is designed to invade is that privacy under whose cover justice is not than and injustice is not seen. It doesn't care whether the poker who leeched his tax-free payoff spent it on seducing little girls; it cares only thata he was rewared for commiting a crime and wasn't brought to book. It doesn't care if the shivver who bought that congressman was straight or gay; it cares only that a public servant took a bribe. It doesn't care if the judge who misdirected the jury was concerned to keep her lover's identity secret; it cares only that a person was jailed who should have been released.

[...]Elihu tried and failed to control a visible shudder. “I haven’t been watching TV, as I told you — but since I’m rooming in the UN Hostel, I’ve been getting first-hand opinions from people of a hundred different nationalities, and take my word, Yatakang is the most cordially hated country on the face of the globe right now, not excluding China.”
“And here’s the crunch,” Norman said, leaning forward to emphasise his words. “There hasn’t been a new crisis since Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere took over. They emerged full-blown into the existing contemporary world, with its generation-long antipathies and hatreds. Even so, I’ve seen what they’ve done to public opinion. Tens — scores — of millions of people are becoming identified with that imaginary couple. The next presidential campaign will pivot on what they think, not on the validity of the rival policies. But the Yatakang question is going to hit first, and what’s worse it’ll hit people in the balls. Below the waist you don’t think, you react. Let Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere only say that this isn’t fair, and you’ll have a party in favour of war against Yatakang within a week.”
There was a short silence.
A kind of anguish was written on Norman’s face. Studying it, Elihu said finally, “It’s remarkable how much you’ve altered in the few days since I met you.”
“What? How do you mean?”
“Laying away your ancestor to his long-time rest has improved you out of recognition. A couple of weeks ago I can imagine you chortling over the discomfiture of the paleasses in face of this breakthrough by yellowbellies. Now what seems to worry you most is the fact that people won’t get the chance to judge the idea dispassionately for themselves, but may get stampeded into stupid emotional reactions.”
“My whole life has been one long emotional reaction,” Norman said, not looking at the older man. “Shall we leave the subject and get back to the business in hand?

State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?”
“Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.”
“So have I, but — well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room.
“Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?”
“The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.”
“So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?”
“Yes, of course — these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.”
“Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?”
“Lord, no! It costs — what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?”
“About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And — to be absolutely frank — a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie.
There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is

we’ve always predicated our quotations on the assumption that life expectancy in the United States would continue to rise. But during the past three years it has in fact started to go down.

Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle!
His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.
Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.
My name is Legion.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.
The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
Say can you look into the seeds of time?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.
The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie — if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because