Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Miserable
Anticipation
Transmuted
Different
Tomorrow
Occasionally
Poised
Mind
Ways
Medium
Scepticism
Way
Open
Mediums
Credulity
Literature
Evolve
Evolving
Sense
Excitement
Predict
Certainty
Awe
Intransigent
Today
Excellence
Cant
Uncritical
Best

More quotes by John Brunner

Image
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
Image
Pay him what was promised, said the caliph. And put out his eyes.
John Brunner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Don't bother explaining--I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
John Brunner
Image
It's supposed to be automatic but actually you have to press this button.
John Brunner
Image
Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.
John Brunner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
John Brunner
Image
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
Image
To go faster you must slow down.
John Brunner
Image
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
John Brunner
Image
Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said.
John Brunner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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