John Brunner - Human Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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 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
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