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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: 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
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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
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Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said.
John Brunner
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The wind was bad today. Hugh's filtermask was used up, all clogged, and he didn't have the seventy-five cents for another from a roadside dispenser, and anyway the quality of those things was lousy, didn't even last the hour claimed for them.
Lousy...
Absently he scratched his crotch. He'd more or less got used to lice by now, of course; there just didn't seem to be any way of avoiding them. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there's none. If there is one try and find it, if there isn't never mind it.
There must be a hell of a lot of evils in the world nowadays that there aren't any remedies for. Anyway: what sun? He hadn't seen the sun in fucking weeks.
John Brunner
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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
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So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
John Brunner
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Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
John Brunner
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I don't believe in God, said the captain. I wouldn't care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.
John Brunner
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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
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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
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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
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Behind her chair, from a wall covered in a very expensive velvet-flock paper, a portrait of her grandfather looked down. He had been an Episcopalian bishop, but the picture showed him in the costume of a New England gentleman keeping up the Old English custom of riding to hounds: red coat, brown boots, distinguished with a white dog-collar and black silk front.
Hugh referred to him as being dressed to kill.
The salad was replaced—though Hugh had sampled only a mouthful of his—by a dish of cold fish with mayonnaise. He didn't even touch this course. He was suddenly afraid of it because it had come from the sea.
John Brunner
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I think, Chad grunted, that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren't.
John Brunner
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What are you going to do for a career?
Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.
John Brunner
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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
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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
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You don't have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.
John Brunner
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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
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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
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Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
John Brunner
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
John Brunner
Born:
September 24, 1934
Died:
August 25, 1995
(aged 60)
Bio:
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and the BSFA award the same year.
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