Quotes from John Brunner

He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

And how do men call you?" "I have many names, but one nature. You may call me Mazda, or anything you please.

I am as guilty as you and you are as guilty as me. We can repent together or we can die together. It must be our joint decision.

Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.

They sought security by piling up more and more irrelevant weapons.

I don't think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.

This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.

Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.

a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race.

only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don't crave power.)

I have many names, but only one nature

The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two.

My degrees are scholarates, not mere doctorates. I've always been very proud of that. Like surgeons over in Britain, taking offense at being called Dr. So-and -so. … But it's irrelevant, it's superfluous, it's silly!

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don't and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

All right for someone earning a hundred thousand a year. For most of us even contract rates are crippling; I should know.

we've always predicated our quotations on the assumption that life expectancy in the United States would continue to rise. But during the past three years it has in fact started to go down.

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.

Votre pays, le mien, tous les pays du monde, partagent la même cause, et le résultat, c'est que des gens qui s'en foutent comme d'une fiente de baleine sont envoyés pour tuer des femmes et des enfants. La voilà, la cause de tous les pays ! Et vous savez ce que c'est que cette cause ? Pour moi, c'est de la rapacité pure et simple, et elle me pue au nez ! »

The real Earth was the place from which men would cheerfully run away to enlist as lowly troopers on a ship like this one, to be cocooned and made to hibernate while light-years ticked away, to be revived and ordered to battle stations against an enemy who might not appear, to return to mindless sleep until the time came for paying-off and discharge – most likely on some other human planet than the race's overcrowded pock-faced homeworld.

What a wise man can do, that can't be done by someone who's merely clever, is make a right judgement in an unprecedented situation. ?

and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!

What third alternative?" Said Chang with the dream-like air of a man who finds himself doing the impossible. "They gave it to us," said the Machine.

A REMARKABLE INSTANCE ON THE PUBLIC SCALE OF THE REAL-LIFE IMPLEMENTATION OF XAVIER CONROY'S DICTUM ABOUT THE PERFECTLY DEFENDED MAN Following Paraguay's declaration of independence from Spain Dr. Francia, the dictator known as "El Supremo," adopted a simple foreign policy: no one was permitted to enter or leave the country and trade was absolutely forbidden.