Quote

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

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John Brunner
Age: 60 †
Born: 1934
Born: September 24
Died: 1995
Died: August 25
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Wallingford
Oxon
John Kilian Houston Brunner
K. H. Brunner
Henry Crosstrees
Jr.
Gill Hunt
John Loxmith
Ellis Quick
Trevor Staines
Keith Woodcott
Already
Told
Become
Unpopular
Right
Quicker
Way
Plausible
People
Mainly
Disagree
Authority

More quotes by John Brunner

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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
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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
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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
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First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
John Brunner
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Christ, what an imagination I've got!
John Brunner
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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
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I just haven't been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can't be a simple one. When I told you you'd been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?
John Brunner
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To go faster you must slow down.
John Brunner
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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
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I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein... That fragment of a 'creed for materialism' which a friend in college had once shown him rose through Donald's confused mind.
John Brunner
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Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
John Brunner
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Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.
John Brunner
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Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
John Brunner
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It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side and not theirs.
John Brunner
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Pay him what was promised, said the caliph. And put out his eyes.
John Brunner
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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
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As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.
John Brunner
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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.
John Brunner
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It's supposed to be automatic but actually you have to press this button.
John Brunner
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Don't bother explaining--I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
John Brunner