John Brunner may refer to:
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.
What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?
Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
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?
We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.
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?
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.
After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.
UNFAIR :; Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage.
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.
Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation," the radio said.
To go faster you must slow down.
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.
Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.
I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein. . . That fragment of a 'creed for materialism' which a friend in college had once shown him rose through Donald's confused mind.
Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good. " And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
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.