Top 50 John Brunner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To go faster you must slow down.”

— John Brunner

2. “I’m myself, not a label.”

— John Brunner

3. “You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you’re old.”

— John Brunner

4. “Don’t bother explaining – I’ve heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.”

— John Brunner

5. “It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.”

— John Brunner

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

— John Brunner

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

— John Brunner

8. “I am I.” “Tat tvam asi.”

— John Brunner

9. “Papa 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 Brunner

10. “If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.”

— John Brunner

11. “Let’s all be different same as me.”

— John Brunner

12. “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

13. “After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.”

— John Brunner

14. “People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the ones worth having for your friends.”

— John Brunner

15. “Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.”

— John Brunner

16. “But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, “How long, O Lord? How long?” In his private estimation: not long now.”

— John Brunner

17. “First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.”

— John Brunner

18. “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”

— John Brunner

19. “UNFAIR :; Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage.”

— John Brunner

20. “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.”

— John Brunner

21. “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.”

— John Brunner

22. “We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.”

— John Brunner

23. “You can’t blame the people who can’t hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.”

— John Brunner

24. “Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.”

— John Brunner

25. “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?”

— John Brunner

26. “It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else – morality, self-respect, honest friendship – they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on.”

— John Brunner

27. “There’s an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that.”

— John Brunner

28. “What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?”

— John Brunner

29. “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

30. “The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.”

— John Brunner

31. “You don’t bother to memorise the literature – you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.”

— John Brunner

32. “Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.”

— John Brunner

33. “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

34. “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.”

— John Brunner

35. “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

36. “COINCIDENCE You weren’t playing attention to the other half of what was going on.”

— John Brunner

37. “Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?”

— John Brunner

38. “I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”

— John Brunner

39. “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 Brunner

40. “In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?”

— John Brunner

41. “It’s the beginning of wisdom when you admit you’ve gone astray.”

— John Brunner

42. “Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.”

— John Brunner

43. “It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children.”

— John Brunner

44. “Out of all the calls taken, nearly half – I think they say forty-five percent – are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. 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 Brunner

45. “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.”

— John Brunner

46. “I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.”

— John Brunner

47. “Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.”

— John Brunner

48. “We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don’t they’ll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates.”

— John Brunner

49. “Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.”

— John Brunner

50. “Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and then the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot.”

— John Brunner