John Brunner Quotes
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?
Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. Doubleday, 1968.
Ideally, public officials would be honest and work for average societal wages, but historically that has rarely occurred in history after revolutions or major changes where idealism was the major driver for public service. But this, when it exists, tends to fade.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become quite atheistic.
Millions of people were hungry. There was not enough wheat (they called it corn) to make up for the failed potatoes, and the aristocracy, the landlords, had a very high protective tariff to prevent American wheat from driving the prices down. The aristocrats would not budge on the “corn laws” so Victoria and her government appropriated funds to buy expensive English wheat to distribute to the needy. She also instituted some public employment so the unemployed would, as in the New Deal later, would work on public improvement. However, all administration went through the landlords who took large portions of the corn for the poor to pay themselves for the cost of distributing the corn to the needy. Then many landlords assigned the publicly paid workers to improvement projects on their own personal land. The Queen and Prince were furious and they began an effort that would repeal the Corn Laws and make England a free trading nation.
He was a key figure in the Social Gospel movement which flourished in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century. Many saw this movement as more dangerous than Communism and some even saw it as Communism. In America there have always been left and right wings of religion and one or the other tends to make the most noise at a particular era.
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and the BSFA award the same year. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970.
