John Brunner Quotes

96 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.

John Brunner
COINCIDENCE You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on.

John Brunner
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
Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

John Brunner
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
Ah, go to hell!
That's a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.

John Brunner
You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.

John Brunner
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
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
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
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
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
UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage.

John Brunner
At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.
The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.
The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees.
Close enough.

John Brunner
I haven't changed my mind, if that's what you're getting at, he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him.

John Brunner
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
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
We've always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.

John Brunner
What in God's name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

John Brunner
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
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
Yes?... Oh, I'm very sorry to hear that. Please convey him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. But the president did ask me to pass this message informally as soon as possible; I may say he feels very strongly about the matter. Of course, not knowing if the rumor is well founded, we didn't want to handle it on an official level... Yes, I would be obliged if you could make sure the ambassador is told at the earliest opportunity. Tell him, please, that any attempt to nominate Austin Train for the Nobel Peace Prize would be regarded as a grave and—I quote the president's actual word—calculated affront to the United States.

John Brunner