The collection / 16 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

John Brunner / quote

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02Undated

What 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 Brunner / quote

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03Undated

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.

John Brunner / quote

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04Undated

You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

John Brunner / quote

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05Undated

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.

John Brunner / quote

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06Undated

She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. 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!

John Brunner / quote

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07Undated

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

John Brunner / quote

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08Undated

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

John Brunner / quote

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09Undated

Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos… A third element of man’s nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.

John Brunner / quote

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10Undated

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.

John Brunner / quote

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11Undated

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.

John Brunner / quote

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12Undated

to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other

John Brunner / quote

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13Undated

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

John Brunner / quote

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14Undated

The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!

John Brunner / quote

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15Undated

Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit?

John Brunner / quote

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16Undated

The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash.

John Brunner / quote

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