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John Brunner

173 quotes

“So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 what’s relayed to us by the TV.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Governments don’t change things,” she said. “Only time does that.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you musn’t,” and “I can but you musn’t.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His brief and frustrating dialogue with them had convinced him that they must divide the human race into three categories: staff, patients and potential patients.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sound of a code being broken is usually the same as that of somebody snapping his fingers.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sound of shutters going up around her mind, armored against anything short of a nuke, was very nearly audible in the room.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone’s temper reached the breaking point and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take advantage of people’s frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was his hope and ambition to cause many deaths. He was an arms salesman by choice, calm and even a little happy to see his products in such demand, capable of trying to clinch a sale at the bedside of a fresh corpse.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t usually talk much about this, Chester, because my grandfather dinned it into me as a child that it doesn’t make any difference who you’re descended from unless you can do something yourself to match what your ancestors did to gain their own notoriety.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The screen was a polychrome swirl, like a rainbow that had been through an electric blender.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’ve been competing against the past, and that’s a contest no one can win because the past has all the advantages. We’ve forgotten all its fiddling little drawbacks: the lice, the skin infections, the disgusting personal habits and the rest of it.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, like they say, nothing can set a precedent until it happens for the first time.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot allow quibbles to stand in the way of the truth.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“THIS BEACH NOT SAFE FOR SWIMMING NOT Drinking Water UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION Now Wash Your Hands (Penalty for noncompliance $50) FILTERMASK DISPENSER Use product once only—maximum 1 hour OXYGEN 25¢”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source