John Brunner

We cannot allow quibbles to stand in the way of the truth.

Well, like they say, nothing can set a precedent until it happens for the first time.

There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen.

We are agreed that before we kill each other we should better serve mankind by killing those who order us to kill each other.

“I was brought up as a Christian,” Cissy said. “Spelt K-I-L-L-J-O-Y. My mam still is one. When I said I was going to quit the church because of what I’d learned from Val about the history of slavery, I thought she was going to kill me!” She laughed nervously. But obviously that was not a joke.

You’ve been competing against the past, and that’s a contest no one can win because the past has all the advantages. We’ve forgotten all its fiddling little drawbacks: the lice, the skin infections, the disgusting personal habits and the rest of it.

I don’t usually talk much about this, Chester, because my grandfather dinned it into me as a child that it doesn’t make any difference who you’re descended from unless you can do something yourself to match what your ancestors did to gain their own notoriety.

Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people.

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.

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.”

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!

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.