John Brunner Quotes

96 Sourced Quotes

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

John Brunner
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
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
So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.

John Brunner
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
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
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
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
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
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
I think, Chad grunted, that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren't.

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

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

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

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

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
... and Dr. Isaiah Williams, whose body was recovered from a ravine near San Pablo. Inquiries are being hampered by what an Army spokesman termed the obstinate attitude of the local people. They won't admit they know their left hands from their right, he asserted. Here at home Senator Richard Howell (Rep., Col.) today launched a fierce attack on the quote chlorophyll addicts unquote who, he claims, are hamstringing American business, already staggering under the load of high unemployment and recession, by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition. In Southern Italy rioting continues in many small towns formerly dependent on fishing. Meantime, dust storms in the Camargue...

John Brunner
Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh.
In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn't last long in the raw air.

John Brunner
They'd have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I'm not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.

John Brunner
How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?
I don't know what you mean, said the navigator. To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I'm going to be dead.

John Brunner