How can a man be so brilliant and so obtuse? - John Brunner

They’d have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I’m not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.

I don’t hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.

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.