David Brin Quotes

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.

All I ask is … ponder with open minds. We’ve made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That's how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.

Back up this ‘grant-hugging’ calumny on the Fox web site by next week, or admit now that you’re a coward-liar.

I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings.

The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she’d been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.

Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago… for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don’t love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They’ll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.

fact.” For example, right after the 2016 U.S. election was trashed by malevolent forces, Facebook invited me to their headquarters to consult about ways to use transparency to prevent their site from being hijacked again by meme-manipulators. I can tell you now that absolutely none of my suggestions were adopted, or even closely examined. I am not encouraged

In 1983, Michael W. Doyle commented on the common observation that democracies almost never wage war on one another. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon may be crucial to our hopes for preventing devastating conflict in the next generation. Which attributes of democracy foster this essential trait of mutual nonaggression?

In that case, I wondered, why do it at all?
Rationalizations. People are talented at coming up with reasons to keep doing stupid things.

Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.” “Why, as men do aland — the great ones eat up the little ones.” — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE King Richard the Second

right after the 2016 U.S. election was trashed by malevolent forces, Facebook invited me to their headquarters to consult about ways to use transparency to prevent their site from being hijacked again by meme-manipulators. I can tell you now that absolutely none of my suggestions were adopted, or even closely examined. I am not encouraged.

The hard-won lesson of the last two centuries, which even many liberals don’t grasp, is that most injustices shrivel under the application of light. And light consists of photons called facts. Reiterating: we see zillionaire oligarchs finance relentless propaganda aimed at riling millions into hatred, and not only wrath aimed at powerless minorities. Just as dangerous is their campaign – stirring up that pre-existing SoA reflex – of open war against “knowledge elites” – precisely because those skill castes do have power! Civil servants, scientists, teachers, doctors, intel agents and so can do a lot to thwart the New Lords’ ambitions. All must be gelded. Broken to harness. Taught their place.