John Brunner

It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for.

So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday.

The sound of a code being broken is usually the same as that of somebody snapping his fingers.

You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.

“How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the navigator. “To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I’m going to be dead.”

In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man “freedom” implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.

"They surely are condemned to Hell

Who rule their lives by greed and lust

And Satan waits for those as well

Who in machines repose their trust."

I can't see heaven but I credit hell —

I live in New York so I know it well.

When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome

God gave it up and He went home.

But there isn’t an outside. Talking about “society’s outcasts” or “opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term “out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for “outside” to be.

Watching their sets in a kind of trance

were people in Mexico, people in France.

They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same —

Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name!

Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,

A gadget on the set makes them look like you. When the Everywhere couple crack a joke

It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.

When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose

It's the with-it view as everyone knows.

It may be a rumor or it may be true

But a gadget on the set has it said by you! "What do you think about Yatakang?"

"I think the same as the Everywhere gang."

"What do you think of Beninia then?"

"The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when."

Whatever my country and whatever my name

A gadget on the set makes me think the same.

How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?

I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there’ll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!