Quotesdtb.com
Home
Authors
Quotes of the day
Top quotes
Topics
John Brunner quotes - page 3
Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn't everybody who bothers to pay attention?
John Brunner
It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.
John Brunner
If you so much as touch him, I'll have to smash every bone in your body-twice, to make sure I didn't miss any the first time. I don't recommend the experience.
John Brunner
Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh. In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn't last long in the raw air.
John Brunner
I don't hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set-up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.
John Brunner
The man had declared, with some justification, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and then gone on to claim that the only solution lay in returning to the Good Old Moral Values of the glorious past. Unable to stand any more, Malcolm had demanded why, if those values were so marvellous, the people who paid lip-service to them had involved mankind in two world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs.
John Brunner
Until last year, although this town was barely fifty miles from Denver, the road had been bad and only a handful of visitors had chanced on it. The increasing tendency for people to take mountain vacations, however, since the sea had become too filthy to be tolerable, could not be ignored. The road now was excellent and the area had exploded.
John Brunner
SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that's processed by General Technics' famed computer Shalmaneser, who sees all, hears all, knows all save only that which YOU, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to yourselves.
John Brunner
Opening the door to the visiting doctor, all set to apologize for the flour on her hands-she had been baking-Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire! ”We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. "Is it a hayrick?” ”The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. "It's from America. The wind's blowing that way.”.
John Brunner
"It would have been a longer and slower job, I'm sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?” "What's the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.
John Brunner
Isn't it typical? We train one man-one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man-to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!
John Brunner
I think,” Chad grunted, "that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren't.
John Brunner
Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather-imitation, of course-the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...
John Brunner
I can make a guess. There's going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that's a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there's going to be trouble.
John Brunner
So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
John Brunner
I don't believe in God,” said the captain. "I wouldn't care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.
John Brunner
So what do you think will happen?” Sawyer asked the barman who was drawing his mid-morning pint. "Dunno,” the man grunted. "Except one thing. I know we've been led by fools and rogues, but this is the first time we've ever been led by a criminal!
John Brunner
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.
John Brunner
He said-let me get this right-he said that among the chief reasons we can't cope with the consequence of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.
John Brunner
He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one's acts destroyed.
John Brunner
Not that a car would have been much faster anyway, what with the police posts at state lines, the searches, the restricted zones not merely in cities-one expected that during August-but right out in the country, in agricultural areas. Because of hijackers after food trucks, of course.
John Brunner
"The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city's treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.
John Brunner
Previous
1
2
3
(Current)
4
5
6
7
Next