John Brunner famous quotes

We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves. We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God.
-- John Brunner

#Running #Powerful #Airplane

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

#Evil #Phenomenon #Humans

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

#Technology #Buttons

I'm myself, not a label.
-- John Brunner

#Labels

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.
-- John Brunner

#Impact #Data #Truth Is

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

#Bullets #Helping #Faster

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

#Change #Two #Politics

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

#Way #Casting #Should

To go faster you must slow down.
-- John Brunner

#Teaching #Learning #Slow Down

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

#Names #Humanity #Machines

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

#Trouble #Excuse #Explaining

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

#People #Want #Way

You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
-- John Brunner

#Years #Proud #Remember

I just haven't been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can't be a simple one. When I told you you'd been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?
-- John Brunner

#Attitude #Opportunity #Simple

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

#Theory #Evidence

Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation," the radio said.
-- John Brunner

#Rumor #Foundation #Santa

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

#People #Television #World

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.
-- John Brunner

#Mind #Want #Facts

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

#Ambition #People #Resentment

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

#People #Cheat #Unfair

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.
-- John Brunner

#Military #Epidemics #Race

Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that's in short supply can't be carved up and shared without destroying it.
-- John Brunner

#Opportunity #Ideas #Giving

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.
-- John Brunner

#New York #Home #Heaven

There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between "ideals," and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.
-- John Brunner

#War #Stupid #Responsibility

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

#Children #Long #Rich

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

#Your Side #Would Be #Sides

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.
-- John Brunner

#Want #Environment #Automobile

Christ, what an imagination I've got!
-- John Brunner

#Imagination #Christ

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.
-- John Brunner

#Stress #Kind #Share

"Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes."
-- John Brunner

#Eye #Cynical #Pay

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
-- John Brunner

#Machines #Use #Firsts

Let's all be different same as me.
-- John Brunner

#Different #Conformity

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
-- John Brunner

#Should #Rational #Humans

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.
-- John Brunner

#Mind #Excellence #Different