John Wood Campbell

“ We have only a few imported types of pushbuttons and a few made by small-scale local producers turning out an inferior product. The only well-organized pushbutton producers in this country are frittering away their time with such unimportant things as teaching people to laugh en masse. Some, even, are going to the outrageous extreme of teaching people how to disconnect pushbuttons that have been so carefully taught into them. But most of the really effective pushbuttons in the country are imported. Our local producers have the sad habit of going into strictly competitive production ”

“ Nature's not nationalistic; she'll answer any properly phrased question asked by any intelligent being anywhere in the universe. The trouble doesn't lie there.
The trouble is pushbutton warfare, and I do not mean the pushbuttons made of plastic and metal by which rockets are launched, or sub-critical masses combined to annihilation. I mean those far more deadly pushbuttons that already exist, all over the world—pushbuttons that have controlled the most deadly of all weapons for many, many years. They're man-made pushbuttons, too—but they're the pushbuttons that set off men's minds. ”

“ These carefully taught pushbuttons are the only kind that are really dangerous to Man; the metal and plastic kind aren't any good at all, the great intercontinental bombardment rockets, the subcritical masses of uranium and plutonium are all useless—unless a man who has been carefully taught is there to push them. And the man won't be, unless a whole population has been carefully taught, with plenty of pushbuttons installed in that deadliest of all weapons—the human mind. ”

“ The official announcement of the obviously inevitable having been made—some months back now; we are not a news magazine, of course—we are, in reality, operating in the world political situation that was clearly predictable. A divided world with atomic weapons. ”