John Brunner Quotes & Sayings

You don't bother to memorise the literature - you learn to read and keep a shelf of books. — John Brunner

Latro, California: "Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!" "Take these pills and come back in three days if you're not better."
Parkington, Texas: "Terrible diarrhea ... " "Take these pills ... "
Hainesport, Louisiana: "Terrible ... " "Take ... "
Baker Bay, Florida ...
Washington, DC ...
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ...
New York, New York ...
Boston, Massachusetts ...
Chicago, Illinois: "Doctor, I know it's Sunday, but the kid's in such a terrible state - you've got to help me!" "Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye."
EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size to take a baby dead from acute infantile enteritis. — John Brunner

People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the ones worth having for your friends. — John Brunner

She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, 'I changed my mind about insects! — John Brunner

Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins,
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific
Of that by which they may remember you. — John Brunner

Let's all be different same as me. — John Brunner

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? — John Brunner

You know, that's what's wrong with us on the public level. We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better. Our society is hurtling in free fall toward heaven knows where, — John Brunner

Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! — John Brunner

What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine? — John Brunner

But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, "How long, O Lord? How long?" In his private estimation: not long now. — John Brunner

The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash. — John Brunner

Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and then the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot. — John Brunner

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

Christ, what an imagination I've got! — John Brunner

We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don't they'll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates. — John Brunner

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

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. — John Brunner

Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time. — John Brunner

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis. — John Brunner

Much earlier than Richardson, before World War I, in fact, Norman Angell had shown that the idea of fighting a war for profit was obsolete. The victors would pay a heavier cost than the losers. He was right, and that First World War proved the fact. The second one hammered it home with everything up to and including nuclear weapons. In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you've been catching the news lately you'll have noticed it's being done more than ever. — John Brunner

True, you're not a slave. You're worse off than that by a long, long way. You're a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren't fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can't pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker. — John Brunner

a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. — John Brunner

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy. — John Brunner

It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans. — John Brunner

On balance, I would say that anybody who reminds our lords and masters that the computerized society is fragile ... has definitely done a service to the public at large. — John Brunner

We are told that "the meek shall inherit the earth." It follows that the meek are chosen of God. I shall try to be meek, not because I want the earth - you can keep it, after the way you've fucked it around it's not worth having - but because I too should like to be chosen of God. QED.
Besides, I like animals better than you bastards. — John Brunner

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. — John Brunner

I can't see heaven but I credit hell I live in New York so I know it well. When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome God gave it up and He went home. — John Brunner

UNFAIR :; Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage. — John Brunner

You don't have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary. — John Brunner

Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. — John Brunner

You will die, and I, and all we can create - why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge. — John Brunner

Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction. — John Brunner

Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order. — John Brunner

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing. — John Brunner

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds. — John Brunner

The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage! — John Brunner

Shit, I forgot. This time of the afternoon the bar's probably shut. Half the staff has gone sick again. Mono, I think. Well, let's go look anyway; we might be lucky. We can't go up to my room
it's full of bugs.'
Which kind?'
Both. — John Brunner

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree. — John Brunner

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. — John Brunner

It's the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else - morality, self-respect, honest friendship - they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they'll be trodden on. — John Brunner

Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about. — John Brunner

Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos ... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing. — John Brunner

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence. — John Brunner

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view. — John Brunner

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism. — John Brunner

Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine ...
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen. — John Brunner

The real universe has a marvellous and unique quality, inasmuch as it and only it can take us completely by surprise. — John Brunner

Don't bother explaining - I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true. — John Brunner

We cannot afford the luxury known as conscience. The enemy we are up against certainly doesn't have one, so we are obliged to be absolutely rational. Cruel, if you like. People of good will, tolerant, liberal, whatever term you care to use, have always labored under a disadvantage. Those in power, those who want to hold on to power whatever the cost, have one ultimate recourse. If all else fails, they are prepared to kill. This is not available to pacifists. — John Brunner

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better. — John Brunner

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. — John Brunner

Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work. — John Brunner

How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter? — John Brunner

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

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind. — John Brunner

In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical? — John Brunner

It's the beginning of wisdom when you admit you've gone astray. — John Brunner

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs. — John Brunner

You know Chad's definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year's model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after? — John Brunner

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. — John Brunner

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better. — John Brunner

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us. — John Brunner

our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus — John Brunner

Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit? — John Brunner

To travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other — John Brunner

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures? — John Brunner

And how do men call you?" "I have many names, but one nature. You may call me Mazda, or anything you please. — John Brunner

I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods. — John Brunner

the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements — John Brunner

Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind?
Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species.
Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President. — John Brunner

I'm myself, not a label. — John Brunner

Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said. — John Brunner

"Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes." — John Brunner

For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia. — John Brunner

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign - a kind of death-rattle - when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them. — John Brunner

The gray-haired growser, who proved to be a lawyer, had made it clear how much he loathed the people who were, in his view, attempting to undermine the American Constitution by imposing a state religion - or possibly it was "religion state by state," for his argument grew more confused with each Martini he sank. At any rate he was noisily predicting that the result would be world domination by the Communist bloc because they would wind up with a monopoly of practical science while his own people would be reduced to praying, sticking pins in chance-opened Bibles, and casting lots to decide whose eldest son should be sacrificed to stave off disaster. — John Brunner

COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on. — John Brunner

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun. — John Brunner

To go faster you must slow down. — John Brunner

There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between "ideals," and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change. — John Brunner

We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.
We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God. — John Brunner

Damn right I voted for him. But if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote - I'd have cast a brick. — John Brunner

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP! — John Brunner