John Brunner

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

SHALMANESER   That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.

NEGRO   Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.

“I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.”

“Ah, go to hell!”

“That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”

“Governments don’t change things,” she said. “Only time does that.”

“It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”

“What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.

Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it.

“The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.

—Blessed are they who expect the worst, for they shall get it!

—If I ever get good at hospital politics, I think I shall start to hate myself.