John Brunner Quotes

And to close on, the Dept of Small Consolations. Some troubledome just figured out that if you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space one foot by two you could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar. ToDAY third MAY twenty-TEN come aGAIN!

when you think about the history of liberty. It’s the story of how principle has gradually been elevated above the whim of tyrants. When the law was defined as more powerful than the king, that was one great breakthrough.

I am I.” “Tat tvam asi.

The sidewalks they passed were crowded. Most of the onlookers were black, and many were children whose eyes reflected unfulfillable dreams. The city's heart was dying before its carcass, and these were the poor, trapped in outworn clothes and rat-ridden tenements.

"There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government," Nick grunted. "Organized crime."
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Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch,get some pressure up for later?”
“I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?”
“They call it streamlining, of course, but what it comes down to is they’re undermining my responsibility in the firm and I’m going to fight tooth and claw to hang on to what I’ve got. If I have to play it dirty that’ll be their fault, not mine.”
“It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.”
“You hold the knife this way, see?”
“Refuse to teach their children to read and write, say it handicaps them for the post-Gutenberg era.”
“Not many people have spotted it but there’s a loophole in the Maryland eugenics law.”
“A polyformer for water-sculpture, quite new.”
“Of course I don’t love Henry the way I love you but the shrinker did tell me I ought to occasionally.”
“I’m just cutting jets for a prayer or two but I’ll be back — don’t get involved with anyone else.”
“That makes seventeen different mixtures I’ve tried, and I’d better have some antalc, right away.”
“I think it was bitchy not to tell Miriam it was pig-meat.

Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him?
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Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.

He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

How right you are.” She shivered. “Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don’t know how they can stand it.

I always wondered what democracy might smell like.

A totally corrupt police-force is the next best to a perfectly honest one. Ours is quite livable with. Mark you, it takes a bit of time occasionally finding out who’s bidding against you, but there are only a few possibilities in a small community like ours.”
“So when he said he had a clean genotype but he was going to be sterilised anyway I lost my temper — can you blame me?”
“It’s twentieth-century for me to be jealous, isn’t it? You keep away from my wife or I’ll get Gwinnie to make you pay forfeit for behaving in a twenty-first century manner!

and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!

This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.