For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.
John BrunnerLike 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.
John BrunnerExtremism. 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.
John BrunnerWhat in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?
John BrunnerThere are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
John Brunnerto travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other
John BrunnerWhat people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.
John BrunnerIf there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
John BrunnerDon't bother explaining--I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
John BrunnerAfter all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.
John BrunnerPapa 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.
John BrunnerIt's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side and not theirs.
John BrunnerAs its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.
John BrunnerWe fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.
John Brunner