John Brunner - People Quotes

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

John Brunner
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles—in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him—you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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