Top 62 John Brunner Quotes
#1. You don't have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.
John Brunner
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!
John Brunner
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Don't bother explaining - I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
John Brunner
#12. I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods.
John Brunner
#13. And how do men call you?" "I have many names, but one nature. You may call me Mazda, or anything you please.
John Brunner
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about.
John Brunner
#23. 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
#24. It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.
John Brunner
#25. Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.
John Brunner
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The real universe has a marvellous and unique quality, inasmuch as it and only it can take us completely by surprise.
John Brunner
#29. 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
#30. If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
John Brunner
#31. 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
#32. If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
John Brunner
#33. "Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes."
John Brunner
#34. What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?
John Brunner
#35. 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
#36. You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
John Brunner
#37. UNFAIR :; Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage.
John Brunner
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on.
John Brunner
#45. 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
#46. First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ... ? Then you serve machines.
John Brunner
#47. To travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other
John Brunner
#48. Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
John Brunner
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. You don't bother to memorise the literature - you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.
John Brunner
#55. Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said.
John Brunner
#56. Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.
John Brunner
#57. 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
#58. Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
John Brunner
#59. 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
#60. It's the beginning of wisdom when you admit you've gone astray.
John Brunner
#61. Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.
John Brunner
#62. Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.
John Brunner
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