Quotes from John Brunner

Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.

We cannot afford the luxury known as conscience. The enemy we are up against certainly doesn't have one, so we are obliged to be absolutely rational. Cruel, if you like. People of good will, tolerant, liberal, whatever term you care to use, have always labored under a disadvantage. Those in power, those who want to hold on to power whatever the cost, have one ultimate recourse. If all else fails, they are prepared to kill. This is not available to pacifists.

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

But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, "How long, O Lord? How long?" In his private estimation: not long now.

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then…?

Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about.

I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.

I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We're elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.

You can't blame the people who can't hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.

Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine... But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible. Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.

Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him? ?

I always wondered what democracy might smell like.

the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements

And to close on, the Dept of Small Consolations. Some troubledome just figured out that if you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space one foot by two you could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar. ToDAY third MAY twenty-TEN come aGAIN!

our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus

Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring

I am I." "Tat tvam asi.

You know, that's what's wrong with us on the public level. We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better. Our society is hurtling in free fall toward heaven knows where

We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV.

Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and then the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot.

How right you are." She shivered. "Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don't know how they can stand it.

UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHAND and JUST LUCKY I GUESS. —The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

when you think about the history of liberty. It's the story of how principle has gradually been elevated above the whim of tyrants. When the law was defined as more powerful than the king, that was one great breakthrough.