John Brunner

Most rich people get rich by taking what they want without paying for it. It’s the way of the world.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

“I see what Gene is driving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!...Oh, it’s ridiculous!”

“A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. “By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.”

One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person.

No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance.

If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises.

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race.

If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal.

Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.

We’ve been amazingly lucky, which is another way of saying we’ve kept our eyes and minds open and responded when something turned up.

He said—let me get this right—he said that among the chief reasons we can’t cope with the consequence of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.