As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

John Brunner

Categorized in : Mind Excellence Different

I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein...

John Brunner

confused believe son

We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.

John Brunner

airplane powerful running

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

John Brunner

stress kind share

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

John Brunner

politics change two

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

John Brunner

rich long children

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.

John Brunner

want people way

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

John Brunner

phenomenon humans evil

It's supposed to be automatic but actually you have to press this button.

John Brunner

zanzibar buttons technology

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.

John Brunner

epidemics military race

For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

John Brunner

truth-is impact data

You have many years to live do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.

John Brunner

proud remember years

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?

John Brunner

resentment ambition people

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

John Brunner

evidence theory ifs

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.

John Brunner

automobile environment want

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.

John Brunner

opportunity giving ideas

I just haven't been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can't be a simple one. When I told you you'd been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?

John Brunner

simple opportunity attitude

Let's all be different same as me.

John Brunner

conformity different

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

John Brunner

mind want facts

To go faster you must slow down.

John Brunner

slow-down learning teaching

"Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes."

John Brunner

cynical eye pay