John Brunner

"Geschichte wiederholt sich."

"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."

"“What are you going to do for a career?” Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.”"

"A doctor is as good as the researchers backing him up."

"And by the way, it’s knowledge that moves mountains, you know, not faith."

"Colin felt a shiver pass down his spine. What man, granted total power, could refrain from using it? And would not his first target inevitably be his fellow men?"

"One of the first benefits of an improved standard of living, as he had already been superficially aware, is to postpone the age at which a person’s opinions congeal for life. Someone forced by poverty to avoid spending on enlarging his horizons the energy and time needed simply for staying alive adopted the attitudes, ready-made, of his environment. This was why students formed the backbone of so many revolutionary movements, for instance."

"A determined elbow jabbed him in the ribs, and he had to come close enough to waking to resist the nudges. He put both arms around his petite, dark, power-packed wife, Midge, and uttered an optimistic grunt. Seven years of marriage enabled her to translate: “Five more minutes?”"

"Some people—mostly attractive women—don’t believe attractive women can act."

"I don’t believe you can cow people into loyalty. Subservience, maybe. But then you must always trust the retainer who guards your back."

"Their lusts had known no limit until now. They had gorged themselves, surpassed their own imaginings again and again, recklessly squandering what they had supposed to be inexhaustible; they had been like children in a house filled with sweetmeats, destroying what they could not consume. Until now. Now it was as though the planet itself was sick of their arrogance."

"Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power."

"Amid the turmoil of change, old people could do no more than wonder what had hit them, and long without enthusiasm for the simpler past."

"Independence has limits. But dependence has, too. I want to set some for myself, that’s all."

"Now, listen. Marriage is binding as a civil contract, but it has—like all my favorite contracts—an escape clause. I make my living by spotting them."

"A cripple can still be a person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity’s in the mind, in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that’s gone what remains is human only in outward shape."

"—Why can I never visualize things turning out better as clearly as I can visualize the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair? “Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!” Hah!"

"He regarded himself as inhabiting a jungle in which behind masks of civilised behavior and conventional politeness everybody, doctor or not, was out for what he could get. No means of enhancing his reputation, status and income escaped him."

"—Among the other things lunatics make: their own version of truth."

"—What was I thinking earlier about lunatics making their own version of truth? Why specify lunatics?"

"—If I ever get good at hospital politics, I think I shall start to hate myself."

"—Blessed are they who expect the worst, for they shall get it!"

"Did you never hear it said that what sets the genius apart from the plodder is the ability to see what happens and not what he expects to happen?"

"I’m unattuned to happiness."

"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."

"HIPCRIME You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only hope."

"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."

"Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful."

"COINCIDENCE You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on."

"“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."

"Joel groaned softly. “I-ah-I don’t think I was altogether myself,” he excused. “Are you ever?” Bertrand countered. “What?” “I am always my self, even when my objurgatory circuits are cut in by some frustration-inducing outside event. But you’re invariably either drunk or suffering indigestion or still half-asleep or so excited as to be manic or so downcast as to be suicidal or—” Loftily Joel broke in: “That’s part of the marvel and wonder of the subjective human experience, not susceptible machine analysis.” He gulped the last of his brandy and set the glass aside. “And we are a fantastic species really, aren’t we? For all our shortcomings! I mean, well—here I am talking to a machine, for pity’s sake, a machine, a manufactured article! So cleverly designed, it’s impossible to tell that its responses are programmed in, not the result of intelligence.” “I resent that,” Bertrand said, but Joel ignored the comment."

"You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary."

"“Ah, go to hell!” “That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”"

"Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?"

"Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say “we,” but if you’re a Bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)"

"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."

"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!"

"We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."

"“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.”"

"In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever."

"“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.”"

"If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: 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."

"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?"

"“And there are more idiots than suckers in the world,” Barney said with a rueful chuckle. “One every second, not one a minute, right?”"