102 Quotes by John Brunner

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.

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.

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says, ” This is new, and therefore better.

COINCIDENCE You weren’t playing attention to the other half of what was going on.

Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.

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.

Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.