John Brunner Quotes

The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Since the discovery of printing, knowledge has been called to power, and power has been used to make knowledge a slave.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.

There is a reason you don’t know all the things I know. -Marcus Eaton

The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing.

Today science prevails not because of its comparative merits, but because the show has been rigged in its favour... It reigns supreme because some past successes have led to institutional measures (education; role of experts; role of power groups such as the AMA) that prevent a comeback of the rivals.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

I remember asking one of the [cyber experts], I said, "Knowing what you know, and you exist behind the curtains so to speak, and you see behind the curtain, do you look at the world differently? Do you feel you have an upper hand?" He just started laughing and said, "Man, people have no idea how exposed they are, how vulnerable, and what's possible."

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

What's really amusing is that you see - when you look at everybody's statements that - on both sides of the aisle, they've talked out of both sides of their mouth, depending on who's in power and who's not.

Depending on which side you're on, maybe the police are too objective and need to be a bit more subjective.

I just don't like the feeling of knowing something that somebody else doesn't.

I have never regretted erring on the side of withholding information.

Oh yes, right—right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.

Information is currency. ... Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent.