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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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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
Others
Lips
Ideas
Service
Better
Short
Carved
Without
Equal
Generate
Giving
Gives
Supply
Even
Society
Jealousy
Thing
Opportunity
Shared
Going
Idea
Destroying

More quotes by John Brunner

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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.
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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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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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First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
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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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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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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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Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
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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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Christ, what an imagination I've got!
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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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You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
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.
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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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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
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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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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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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