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

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First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
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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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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 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'm myself, not a label.
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Pay him what was promised, said the caliph. And put out his eyes.
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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 common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side and not theirs.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
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Christ, what an imagination I've got!
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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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Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their work.
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To go faster you must slow down.
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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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