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

More quotes by 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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Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
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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Christ, what an imagination I've got!
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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Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
John Brunner
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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.
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 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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Pay him what was promised, said the caliph. And put out his eyes.
John Brunner
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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.
John Brunner
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Rumors that the sun is out at Santa Ynez are without foundation, the radio said.
John Brunner
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To go faster you must slow down.
John Brunner