John Brunner: Trending quotes

“There’s one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between “ideals,” and with luck they won’t have left their genes behind because they’ll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they’re too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.”

tracking with closeups (31) “Unto Us a Child”
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.”

context (8) “Isolation”
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)

“Get me a drink of water, please, and something to quiet my belly. It’s rumbling so much I can’t hear myself think.”

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

John Brunner book The Tides of Time

Source: The Tides of Time (1984), Chapter 3 (p. 48)

“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?”

“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)