# Quote — John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar

> If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: 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.

- Author: [John Brunner](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner.md)
- Book: [Stand On Zanzibar](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/stand-on-zanzibar.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Brunner#Stand_on_Zanzibar_(1968)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/stand-on-zanzibar/if-you-want

## More from this book

> LOGIC   The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you musn’t,” and “I can but you musn’t.”

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/stand-on-zanzibar/logic-the-principle.md)

> Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/stand-on-zanzibar/isnt-it-typical.md)

> What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/stand-on-zanzibar/what-in-gods.md)