John Brunner (1934 – 1995)
Science fiction author.
“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.
HIPCRIME You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only hope.
If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
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.
Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“
If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
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.
SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it.
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?