John Brunner > Quotes

“It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. ”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“I'm myself, not a label.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Don't bother explaining—I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.”
― John Brunner, Children of the Thunder

“to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other”
― John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

“True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“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.”
― John Brunner , The Compleat Traveller in Black

“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!”
― John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

“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, Stand on Zanzibar

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

“After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.”
― John Brunner

“The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!”
― John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

“We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.”
― John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

“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?”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“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!”
― John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

“intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“…as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. ‘The subject exhibited a pain response.’ But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“It’s the beginning of wisdom when you admit you’ve gone astray.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“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.”
― John Brunner, The Crucible of Time

“It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider