John Brunner Quotes

96 Sourced Quotes

SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that's processed by General Technics' famed computer Shalmaneser, who sees all, hears all, knows all save only that which YOU, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to yourselves.

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
Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say we, but if you're a Bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm's length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)

John Brunner
I just haven't been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can't be a simple one. When I told you you'd been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?

John Brunner
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
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
To travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other

John Brunner
I can make a guess. There's going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that's a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there's going to be trouble.

John Brunner
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
Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.

John Brunner
I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there'll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!

John Brunner
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
He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one's acts destroyed.

John Brunner
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
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
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
NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

John Brunner
I don't hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.

John Brunner
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then...? Then you serve machines.

John Brunner
At night, when he lay down to sleep, he felt that his brain was resonating with the heartbeat of the planet.

John Brunner
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
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
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
There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between ideals, and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.

John Brunner
Governments don't change things, she said. Only time does that.

John Brunner