Quotes from 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.

What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

To go faster you must slow down.

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

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

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

I'm myself, not a label.

Don't bother explaining—I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.

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

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

You don't bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.

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

We are told that "the meek shall inherit the earth." It follows that the meek are chosen of God. I shall try to be meek, not because I want the earth - you can keep it, after the way you've fucked it around it's not worth having - but because I too should like to be chosen of God. QED. Besides, I like animals better than you bastards.

She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. 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!

Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos… A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

Damn right I voted for him. But if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote—I'd have cast a brick.

The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!

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!

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

You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?