People From Oxford

"THIS BEACH NOT SAFE FOR SWIMMING NOT Drinking Water UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION Now Wash Your Hands (Penalty for noncompliance $50) FILTERMASK DISPENSER Use product once only—maximum 1 hour OXYGEN 25¢"

"“Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation,” the radio said."

"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."

"By the door, a large red object with a mirror on the upper part of its front. Installed last fall. Japanese. On a plate at the side: Mitzuyama Corp., Osaka. Shaped like a weighing machine. Stand here and insert 25c. Do not smoke while using. Place mouth and nose to soft black flexible mask. Like an obscene animal’s kiss. Usually he laughed at it because up here in the mountains the air was never so bad you needed to tank up on oxygen to make the next block. On the other hand some people did say it was a hell of a good cure for a hangover . . ."

"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."

"No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance."

"The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about. Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?"

"“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.”"

"We’ve been amazingly lucky, which is another way of saying we’ve kept our eyes and minds open and responded when something turned up."

"First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race."

"One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person."

"The writers who influenced me most tended to be those who were the most prolific. John Brunner was very prolific-my favorites are Polymath, The Whole Man, and The Long Result..."

"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."

"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."

"“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!”"

"Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn’t everybody who bothers to pay attention?"

"“When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage?”"

"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.”"

"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."

"We are agreed that before we kill each other we should better serve mankind by killing those who order us to kill each other."

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

"John Brunner, who writes one extraordinary book to ten into-one-end-of-the-typewriter-and-out-the-other, adventure by the yard commodities"

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread."

"He was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion."

"Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people."

"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."

"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."

"How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!"

"How can a man be so brilliant and so obtuse?"

"“I was brought up as a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke."

"There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen."

"I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did."

""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."

"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."

"Most rich people get rich by taking what they want without paying for it. It’s the way of the world."

"If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises."

"“Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.”"

"I marvel’d how Man, by his GOD-sent wit, Thus tam’d the salamander Element And loos’d the Metal in the mountain pent To make us Saws, and Shears, and useful Plows, Swords for our hands, and Helmets for our brows, The surgeon’s Scalpel, vehicle of Health, And all our humble Tools for gaining wealth . . . ”De Arte Munificente,” Seventeenth century"

"“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.”"

"When the politicians claim that the public isn’t interested any longer in environmental conservation, they’re half right. People are actually afraid to be interested, because they suspect—I think rightly—that we’ll find if we dig deep enough that we’ve gone so far beyond the limits of what the planet will tolerate that only a major catastrophe which cuts back both our population and our ability to interfere with the natural biocycle would offer a chance of survival."

"“Yes? . . . Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Please convey him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. But the president did ask me to pass this message informally as soon as possible; I may say he feels very strongly about the matter. Of course, not knowing if the rumor is well founded, we didn’t want to handle it on an official level . . . Yes, I would be obliged if you could make sure the ambassador is told at the earliest opportunity. Tell him, please, that any attempt to nominate Austin Train for the Nobel Peace Prize would be regarded as a grave and—I quote the president’s actual word—calculated affront to the United States.”"

"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."

"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!’ “"

"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."

"Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles. Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowl like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climactic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revised their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river. And so on. Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone."

"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."

"The wind was bad today. Hugh’s filtermask was used up, all clogged, and he didn’t have the seventy-five cents for another from a roadside dispenser, and anyway the quality of those things was lousy, didn’t even last the hour claimed for them. Lousy . . . Absently he scratched his crotch. He’d more or less got used to lice by now, of course; there just didn’t seem to be any way of avoiding them. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there’s none. If there is one try and find it, if there isn’t never mind it. There must be a hell of a lot of evils in the world nowadays that there aren’t any remedies for. Anyway: what sun? He hadn’t seen the sun in fucking weeks."

"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."

". . . 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 . . ."

"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."