John Brunner

“Mother Superior couldn’t be drearier! Life is oppressive and lonely and dun! Little Miss Celia envied Ophelia—Hamlet ignored her and then there was none! Rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. Penny a look, goobledegook, you can’t live the life that you read in a book. Pouncing and bouncing hear what I’m announcing—it’s true and you’ll never hide from it. You may think you’re knowing in coming and going but you can’t take the ‘come’ out of ‘comet.’ As I was going down the drains I met a man with seven brains. Every brain had seven lives, every life had seven wives, every wife told seven lies, who will win the liars’ prize?”

Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.

It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs.

If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.

Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“

Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind.

He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.

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.

That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man.

If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?

“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!