John Brunner Quotes

“Whatever my country and whatever my name
A gadget on the set makes me think the same.”

context (16) "Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere: Calypso (stanzas 2, 5, and 7) 
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Context: Watching their sets in a kind of trance
were people in Mexico, people in France.
They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same —
Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name!
Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you. When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
It's the with-it view as everyone knows.
It may be a rumor or it may be true
But a gadget on the set has it said by you! "What do you think about Yatakang?"
"I think the same as the Everywhere gang."
"What do you think of Beninia then?"
"The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when."
Whatever my country and whatever my name
A gadget on the set makes me think the same.

“First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then …? Then you serve machines.”

John Brunner Quotes

“If you so much as touch him, I’ll have to smash every bone in your body—twice, to make sure I didn’t miss any the first time. I don’t recommend the experience.”

continuity (14) "The Right Man For The Job"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

John Brunner

Section 5 (p. 127)
Short fiction, You’ll Take the High Road (1973)

“Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh.
In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn’t last long in the raw air.”

“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.”

December “A ROOST FOR CHICKENS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“Opening the door to the visiting doctor, all set to apologize for the flour on her hands—she had been baking—Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
”We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
”The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.””

context (1) “Scanalyze My Name“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Behind her chair, from a wall covered in a very expensive velvet-flock paper, a portrait of her grandfather looked down. He had been an Episcopalian bishop, but the picture showed him in the costume of a New England gentleman keeping up the Old English custom of riding to hounds: red coat, brown boots, distinguished with a white dog-collar and black silk front.
Hugh referred to him as being dressed to kill.
The salad was replaced—though Hugh had sampled only a mouthful of his—by a dish of cold fish with mayonnaise. He didn’t even touch this course. He was suddenly afraid of it because it had come from the sea.”

November “THE SMOKE OF THAT GREAT BURNING”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
::: — John Milton: "Lycidas"”

February “DISGRACE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever.”

Next year
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

““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.”

context (11) “Come Outside and Say That”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“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!”

continuity (37) “Storage”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?”

continuity (42) “And Say Which Seed Will Grow“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people.”

tracking with closeups (31) “Unto Us a Child”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“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.”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 5 (p. 44)

“He was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion.”

context (2) "Editorial Slot"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage?”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 3 (p. 26)

“If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises.”

November “THERE IS HOPE YET”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

John Brunner book The Tides of Time

Source: The Tides of Time (1984), Chapter 11 (p. 202)

“I marvel’d how Man, by his GOD-sent wit,
Thus tam’d the salamander Element
And loos’d the Metal in the mountain pent
To make us Saws, and Shears, and useful Plows,
Swords for our hands, and Helmets for our brows,
The surgeon’s Scalpel, vehicle of Health,
And all our humble Tools for gaining wealth...
”De Arte Munificente,” Seventeenth century”

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

September “MOTHER-RAPERS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“At night, when he lay down to sleep, he felt that his brain was resonating with the heartbeat of the planet.”

continuity (27) "Manscape"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“All this time, though, this feeling that the world was ‘’bound’’ to go to hell! Okay, so it’s true these mothers have turned prairies into dustbowls and used the sea for a giant sewer and laid concrete where there used to be forests. So stop them! Don’t just let them walk over you, crush you face-down into the dirt!
Crush them first!”

January “EARTHMOVER”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.”

April “REHEARSAL”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“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.”

tracking with closeups (2) “Yonderboy”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider

Bk. 2, Ch. "Let's All Be Different Same As Me"
The Shockwave Rider (1975)

“How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!”

“NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 17 (p. 135)

“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?”

context (6) “One Comes Out Where...”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn’t everybody who bothers to pay attention?”

context (8) “Isolation”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“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.”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 3 (p. 27)

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider

Bk. 1, Ch. "Paradox, Next Stop After the Boondocks
The Shockwave Rider (1975)

“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.”

“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

the happening world (6) "Street Seen"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble.”

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.”

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.”

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“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.”

continuity (10) “Due Process”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“.. and Dr. Isaiah Williams, whose body was recovered from a ravine near San Pablo. Inquiries are being hampered by what an Army spokesman termed the obstinate attitude of the local people. “They won’t admit they know their left hands from their right,” he asserted. Here at home Senator Richard Howell (Rep., Col.) today launched a fierce attack on the quote chlorophyll addicts unquote who, he claims, are hamstringing American business, already staggering under the load of high unemployment and recession, by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition. In Southern Italy rioting continues in many small towns formerly dependent on fishing. Meantime, dust storms in the Camargue...”

continuity (37) “Storage”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

““I was brought up as a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke.”

.
January “AND IT GOES ON”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“He said—let me get this right—he said that among the chief reasons we can’t cope with the consequence of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 24 (p. 187)

““What are you going to do for a career?”
Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.””

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 10 (p. 77)

“Yes?... Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Please convey him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. But the president did ask me to pass this message informally as soon as possible; I may say he feels very strongly about the matter. Of course, not knowing if the rumor is well founded, we didn’t want to handle it on an official level... Yes, I would be obliged if you could make sure the ambassador is told at the earliest opportunity. Tell him, please, that any attempt to nominate Austin Train for the Nobel Peace Prize would be regarded as a grave and—I quote the president’s actual word—calculated affront to the United States.”

continuity (3) “After One Decade”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“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.”

July “SCRATCHED”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“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.“”

continuity (39) “Better To Be a Volcano”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Not that a car would have been much faster anyway, what with the police posts at state lines, the searches, the restricted zones not merely in cities—one expected that during August—but right out in the country, in agricultural areas. Because of hijackers after food trucks, of course.”

tracking with closeups (32) “The Cool and Detached View“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

““The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.”

August “THE END OF A LONG DARK TUNNEL”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.
The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.
The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees.
Close enough.”

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“We are agreed that before we kill each other we should better serve mankind by killing those who order us to kill each other.”

July “BLOWBACK”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“... published today as a United Nations Special Report. The alleged rise of intelligence in so-called backward countries is ascribed by the scientists who conducted the three-year investigation to improved diet and sanitation, while the as-yet unconfirmed decline in advanced nations is attributed to intensified pollution. Asked to comment on the report just prior to leaving for Hollywood, where he is tonight slated to open his annual retrospective, Prexy said, quote, Well, if they’re so smart why aren’t they clever? End quote. At a press conference in Tegucigalpa the disappearance of Leonard Ross, field agent for Globe Relief, and Dr. Isaiah Williams, the British medico who’s also unaccounted for, was officially ascribed today to terrorism. Troops are searching the area intensively, but so far have reported no success. Following the shock resignation of the former president of the “Save the Med” fund, Dottore Giovanni Crespinolo, the Italian government has flatly denied his charge that the vast sums donated by corporations and individuals in forty-eight countries in the hope of saving the doomed landlocked sea have been embezzled. Reports from Rome, however...”

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 23 (p. 180)

“By the door, a large red object with a mirror on the upper part of its front. Installed last fall. Japanese. On a plate at the side: Mitzuyama Corp., Osaka. Shaped like a weighing machine. Stand here and insert 25c. Do not smoke while using. Place mouth and nose to soft black flexible mask. Like an obscene animal’s kiss.
Usually he laughed at it because up here in the mountains the air was never so bad you needed to tank up on oxygen to make the next block. On the other hand some people did say it was a hell of a good cure for a hangover...”

January “NO BIGGER THAN A MAN’S HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man “freedom” implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.”

December “IT’S A GAS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“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.”

context (8) “Isolation”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“This year we take our vacation somewhere else. Where is there where Americans aren’t likely to be stoned by a howling mob? Spain, Greece? No, got to be out of range of the stench from the Med.
Looks like we might as well stay home.”

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?”

May “BLANKET”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)