John Brunner (1934 – 1995)
Science fiction author.
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?
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.
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.
Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!
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.
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.
You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.
“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”
“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”
“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”
COINCIDENCE You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.
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.
Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.
“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.”