# Quote — John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

> The Gottschalks aren’t government contractors, they’re catering for the domestic market. So what? Right this minute, if your credit rating is good, you can walk down the street to an arms store and buy a bandolier of micronukes, and those would be enough to clear the average city block. We’ve just been lucky so far that not many people can afford to lay out sixty thousand tealeaves for the privilege of killing their neighbors. Improve your production methods, cut your costs, and you can make this available to anyone in the middle income grades. Lovely! Especially if your customers have had it dinned into them that the local knee enclave already has this particular goody in its armory. Don’t bother to argue—you know that’s how it’s worked.”

- Author: [John Brunner](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner.md)
- Book: [The Jagged Orbit](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/the-jagged-orbit.md)
- Page: 354
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Brunner#The_Jagged_Orbit_(1969)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/the-jagged-orbit/the-gottschalks-arent

## More from this book

> His brief and frustrating dialogue with them had convinced him that they must divide the human race into three categories: staff, patients and potential patients.

p. 73 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/the-jagged-orbit/his-brief-and.md)

> Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.

p. 10 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/the-jagged-orbit/western-culture-is-undergoing.md)

> It was his hope and ambition to cause many deaths. He was an arms salesman by choice, calm and even a little happy to see his products in such demand, capable of trying to clinch a sale at the bedside of a fresh corpse.

p. 163 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-brunner/the-jagged-orbit/it-was-his.md)