The Shockwave Rider Quotes

“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, The Shockwave Rider

“I'm myself, not a label.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“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, The Shockwave Rider

“Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote—I’d have cast a brick.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“It’s the beginning of wisdom when you admit you’ve gone astray.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“…as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. ‘The subject exhibited a pain response.’ But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don’t they’ll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“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. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government," Nick grunted. "Organized crime."
​”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“They sought security by piling up more and more irrelevant weapons.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“There are two kinds of fool. One says, ‘This is old, and therefore good.’ And one says, ‘This is new, and therefore better.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded--which was a major breakthrough in itself--the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net--that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine...Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, “How long, O Lord? How long?” In his private estimation: not long now.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine...
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring,”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“I always wondered what democracy might smell like.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

“Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him?
​”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider