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John Brunner
173 quotes
“Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation,” the radio said.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the door, a large red object with a mirror on the upper part of its front. Installed last fall. Japanese. On a plate at the side: Mitzuyama Corp., Osaka. Shaped like a weighing machine. Stand here and insert 25c. Do not smoke while using. Place mouth and nose to soft black flexible mask. Like an obscene animal’s kiss. Usually he laughed at it because up here in the mountains the air was never so bad you needed to tank up on oxygen to make the next block. On the other hand some people did say it was a hell of a good cure for a hangover . . .”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until last year, although this town was barely fifty miles from Denver, the road had been bad and only a handful of visitors had chanced on it. The increasing tendency for people to take mountain vacations, however, since the sea had become too filthy to be tolerable, could not be ignored. The road now was excellent and the area had exploded.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A crank, like I say. Won’t let him fly. Says she wants her grandchildren to see the sun. What difference it makes if a plane flies with one seat empty, I don’t know!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unto the third and fourth generation, General Motors, you have visited your greed on the children. Unto the twentieth, AEC, you have twisted their limbs and closed their eyes. Unto the last dawn of man you have cursed us, O Father. Our Father. Our Father Which art in Washington, give us this day our daily calcium propionate, sodium diacetate monoglyceride, potassium bromate, calcium phosphate, monobasic chloramine T, aluminium potassium sulphate, sodium benzoate, butylated hydroxyanisole, mono-iso-propyl citrate, axerophthol and calciferol. Include with it a little flour and salt. Amen.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At night, when he lay down to sleep, he felt that his brain was resonating with the heartbeat of the planet.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Grade-A MEXICAN HONEYBEES $165.95/gallon! Grade-A EUROPEAN BEES only $220/gallon! Best quality IRISH EARTHWORMS $67.50/quart! GUARANTEED live on delivery! Plant Fertility Corp., San Clemente, Calif. (Licensed by California State Board of Agriculture.)”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Special this week at your Puritan Health Supermarket! Okinawa squash, reg. $0.89 $0.75! Penguin eggs (low on DDT, PCB), reg. $6.35 doz. $6.05! Pacific potatoes (unwashed), reg. $0.89 lb. $0.69! Butter from sunny New Zealand, reg. $1.35 qrt. $1.15! YOU TOO CAN AFFORD GOOD HEALTH AT PURITAN!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You and your ancestors treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was cool and quiet in here because instead of windows there were cosmoramic projections, latest of late devices to prevent the intrusion of untasteful exterior reality. Nearby the chimneys reeked a twenty-four-hour day yet the view was of clean white clouds, blue sky, yellow sun not so bright that it dazzled. Superior to the natural article, yes. Also birds flew or perched between two layers of glass on real branches in air-conditioned environment. It was not ordinary to see birds. Very yes.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People didn’t fly the Atlantic any more if they could help it, except from bravado. Even if your plane wasn’t sabotaged or hijacked, it was certain to be behind schedule. Not that there was much to be said for ocean travel either, since the sinking of the Paolo Rizzi last summer and the drowning of thirteen hundred passengers in a sea made foul by a hundred and eighty thousand tons of oil from the tanker she’d collided with. Moral, definitely: stay home.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plane droned on through the black sky, above the clouds masking the Atlantic. It suddenly occurred to Michael that he ought to look at the moon. He hadn’t seen it all the time he was in Paris, nor the stars. He slid up the blind of his window and peered out. There was no moon visible. When he consulted his diary he discovered that it had set, a tiny sliver, at exactly the time the plane had taken off from London.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All this time, though, this feeling that the world was ‘’bound’’ to go to hell! Okay, so it’s true these mothers have turned prairies into dustbowls and used the sea for a giant sewer and laid concrete where there used to be forests. So stop them! Don’t just let them walk over you, crush you face-down into the dirt! Crush them first!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This year we take our vacation somewhere else. Where is there where Americans aren’t likely to be stoned by a howling mob? Spain, Greece? No, got to be out of range of the stench from the Med. Looks like we might as well stay home.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fifteen minutes out of Mexico City for Tokyo a passenger aboard a 747 screamed that he was being eaten by red-hot ants, and managed to open the emergency door at 23,000 feet. He had been to the washroom and drunk from the faucet there before takeoff. It was, after all, labeled DRINKING WATER.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the politicians claim that the public isn’t interested any longer in environmental conservation, they’re half right. People are actually afraid to be interested, because they suspect—I think rightly—that we’ll find if we dig deep enough that we’ve gone so far beyond the limits of what the planet will tolerate that only a major catastrophe which cuts back both our population and our ability to interfere with the natural biocycle would offer a chance of survival.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not that a car would have been much faster anyway, what with the police posts at state lines, the searches, the restricted zones not merely in cities—one expected that during August—but right out in the country, in agricultural areas. Because of hijackers after food trucks, of course.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I marvel’d how Man, by his GOD-sent wit, Thus tam’d the salamander Element And loos’d the Metal in the mountain pent To make us Saws, and Shears, and useful Plows, Swords for our hands, and Helmets for our brows, The surgeon’s Scalpel, vehicle of Health, And all our humble Tools for gaining wealth . . . ”De Arte Munificente,” Seventeenth century”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“. . . include prima facie but not ipso facto the following: (a) Homosexuality or gross indecency with another male person; (b) Possession of or trading in an illegal narcotic or other drug; (c) Living upon the earnings of prostitution; (d) Membership in the Communist Party or one of its front organizations (see schedule attached); (e) “Trainism”; (f) Advocating the violent overthrow of the government; (g) Slandering the President of the United States; (h) . . .”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Opening the door to the visiting doctor, all set to apologize for the flour on her hands—she had been baking—Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire! ”We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?” ”The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn’t everybody who bothers to pay attention?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man had declared, with some justification, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and then gone on to claim that the only solution lay in returning to the Good Old Moral Values of the glorious past. Unable to stand any more, Malcolm had demanded why, if those values were so marvellous, the people who paid lip-service to them had involved mankind in two world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said—let me get this right—he said that among the chief reasons we can’t cope with the consequence of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So what do you think will happen?” Sawyer asked the barman who was drawing his mid-morning pint. “Dunno,” the man grunted. “Except one thing. I know we’ve been led by fools and rogues, but this is the first time we’ve ever been led by a criminal!”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are agreed that before we kill each other we should better serve mankind by killing those who order us to kill each other.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was brought up as a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can a man be so brilliant and so obtuse?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I was never put on trial, never convicted!" "You are not entitled to a trial." "Anybody's entitled to a trial, damn you!" "That is absolutely true. But you see you are not anybody. You are nobody.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about. Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Get me a drink of water, please, and something to quiet my belly. It’s rumbling so much I can’t hear myself think.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most rich people get rich by taking what they want without paying for it. It’s the way of the world.”
John Brunner (1934–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source