Quote

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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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
Stressing
Kind
Members
Competing
Rattle
Beings
Forced
Share
Factors
Extremism
Almost
Belong
Shares
Death
Sign
Infallible
Others
Stress
Expense
Human
Necessarily
Institution
Humans
Institutions
Expenses

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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.
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First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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There are two kinds of fools. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
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Pay him what was promised, said the caliph. And put out his eyes.
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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.
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Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
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It's supposed to be automatic but actually you have to press this button.
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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.
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Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.
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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.
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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.
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Don't bother explaining--I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
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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