John Brunner quotes - page 4

At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees. The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO. The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees. Close enough. (John Brunner)
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
In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man "freedom” implies a full rice-bowl-or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.
John Brunner
How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?” "I don't know what you mean,” said the navigator. "To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I'm going to be dead.
John Brunner
This year we take our vacation somewhere else. Where is there where Americans aren't likely to be stoned by a howling mob? Spain, Greece? No, got to be out of range of the stench from the Med. Looks like we might as well stay home.
John Brunner
Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned ... How long did he buy with the currency of his soul - ten years?
John Brunner
Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.
John Brunner
"But I was never put on trial, never convicted!" "You are not entitled to a trial." "Anybody's entitled to a trial, damn you!" "That is absolutely true. But you see you are not anybody. You are nobody.
John Brunner
LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it'll be someone else's bones which go crack and not their own.
John Brunner
.. that the Army is using defoliants in Honduras to create fire-free zones. This charge has been strongly denied by the Pentagon. Asked to comment just prior to leaving for Hawaii, where he will convalesce for the next two or three weeks, Prexy said, quote, Well, if you can't see them you can't shoot them. End quote. Support has been growing for a bill which Senator Richard Howell will introduce at the earliest opportunity, forbidding the issue of a passport to any male between sixteen and sixty not in possession of a valid discharge certificate or medical exemption. Welcoming the proposal, a Pentagon spokesman today admitted that of the last class called for the draft more than one in three failed to report. Your steaks are going to cost you more. This warning was today issued by the Department of Agriculture. The price of animal fodder has quote taken off like a rocket unquote, following the mysterious...
John Brunner
"A crank, like I say. Won't let him fly. Says she wants her grandchildren to see the sun. What difference it makes if a plane flies with one seat empty, I don't know! (John Brunner)
What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.
John Brunner
We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV.
John Brunner
Grade-A MEXICAN HONEYBEES $165.95/gallon! Grade-A EUROPEAN BEES only $220/gallon! Best quality IRISH EARTHWORMS $67.50/quart! GUARANTEED live on delivery! Plant Fertility Corp., San Clemente, Calif. (Licensed by California State Board of Agriculture.)
John Brunner
If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you're a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal.
John Brunner
It was cool and quiet in here because instead of windows there were cosmoramic projections, latest of late devices to prevent the intrusion of untasteful exterior reality. Nearby the chimneys reeked a twenty-four-hour day yet the view was of clean white clouds, blue sky, yellow sun not so bright that it dazzled. Superior to the natural article, yes. Also birds flew or perched between two layers of glass on real branches in air-conditioned environment. It was not ordinary to see birds. Very yes.
John Brunner
I see what Gene is driving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!... Oh, it's ridiculous!” "A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. "By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.
John Brunner
General Kaika: Was it black men who filled the Mediterranean with poison? No, it was destroyed by the filthy wastes from European factories! Reporter: Well, the Aswan dam-- General Kaika: Yes, yes, the Aswan dam may have tipped the balance finally, but before that the sea was dying. Because so many had to starve on the African coast there began this war. That is why I say the white countries are responsible. It is the typical white habit to ruin what you have and then go to steal from other people. Reporter: Oh, General, you're stretching the facts a bit! General Kaika: Is the fact that it is dangerous to swim in the Mediterranean? Is the fact that the fish have died? Reporter: Well, yes, but-- General Kaika: I have no more to say.
John Brunner
I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there'll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!
John Brunner
But there isn't an outside. Talking about "society's outcasts” or "opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they're benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term "out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There's no place for "outside” to be.
John Brunner
"I haven't changed my mind, if that's what you're getting at,” he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him. (John Brunner)
Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we've learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we're inseparable from it.
John Brunner
That's behind me. Same as with everything else in my life, though, I approached what I learned with eyes and ears half-closed. It's only now I realise how dangerous and destructive Christian culture has become. If there was ever any love in it, it's been bled out. Three major religions preach Holy War: Shintoism, Islam, and Christianity. Christianity is the only one hypocritical enough simultaneously to enjoin its followers to turn the other cheek and suffer fools gladly and the rest of it. Look at the record. Germany was a Christian country almost exactly one hundred times as long as it was Nazi. Did the Nazis undo in twelve years all the church had done in twelve centuries? No, they built on it. Hitler was a baptised Catholic and never excommunicated. When he was enlisting the support of the bishops in 1933 he promised to do nothing to the Jews that the church had not already, and kept his promise.
John Brunner
They'd have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I'm not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.
John Brunner
Fifteen minutes out of Mexico City for Tokyo a passenger aboard a 747 screamed that he was being eaten by red-hot ants, and managed to open the emergency door at 23,000 feet. He had been to the washroom and drunk from the faucet there before takeoff. It was, after all, labeled DRINKING WATER.
John Brunner