“It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. ”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“Putain mais quelle fichue imagination je peux avoir ...”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins,
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific
Of that by which they may remember you.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“Much earlier than Richardson, before World War I, in fact, Norman Angell had shown that the idea of fighting a war for profit was obsolete. The victors would pay a heavier cost than the losers. He was right, and that First World War proved the fact. The second one hammered it home with everything up to and including nuclear weapons. In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
“COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on.”
― John Brunner, quote from Stand on Zanzibar
John Brunner
Born place: in Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date September 24, 1934
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“Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.”
― James Howe, quote from The Misfits
“Yer love for 'im is so obvious. 'Tis sweet to see, it is!" "Becky!" The girl, still grinning, had shrugged. "Ye can't hide it, ye know. And Oi'll wager yer man — charmin', kind, an' 'andsome as 'e is — is a real easy one to love." "Well yes, he is, but — it's just that —" Juliet had turned as pink as Swanthorpe's brick and looked away, suddenly flustered. "I guess it's just rather difficult to admit my feelings, even to myself." But Becky had merely laughed knowingly. "'Well, then, maybe ye'd better admit 'em, 'cause it's plain that yer man's roight in love with you, 'e is!”
― Danelle Harmon, quote from The Wild One
“The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses.”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, quote from The Dogs of Babel
“Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.”
― Sonya Hartnett, quote from Surrender
“The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.”
― Ryan Boudinot, quote from Blueprints Of The Afterlife
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