David Brin Quotes

The three basic material rights — continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.

Snow and soot covered the ancient tree's broken branches and seared bark. It wasn't dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren't doing well. The end was near.
A shadow loomed, and a creature settled into the drifts, and old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree.
Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest — a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ruined wood on the ground, piling the bits higher until it was clear that it was not a nest at all.
It was a pyre.
The bloody, dying thing settled in atop the kindling, and crooned soft music unlike anything ever heard before. A glow began to build, surrounding the beast soon in a rich purple lambience. Blue flames burst forth.
And the tree seemed to respond. Aged, ruined branches curled forward toward the heat, like an old man warming his hands. Snow shivered and fell, the green patches grew and began to fill the air with the fragrance of renewal
It was not the creature on the pyre that was reborn, and even in sleep, that surprised Gordon. The great bird was consumed, leaving only bones.
But the tree blossomed, and from its flowering branches things uncurled and drifted off into the air.
He stared in wonderment when he saw that they were balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships. Dreams.
They floated away in all directions, and the air was filled with hope.

They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.

On the other hand, there is so much hypocrisy among supposed free market champions! The 5,000 golf buddies in America’s smug CEO caste – plus their New Lord backers and Wall Street pals – claim to oppose central planning. But their circle-jerk connivings only shift it away from openly accountable civil servants into dark crypts that are secret, self-flattering and inherently stupid.

Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

The Union will awaken. It always has. We always will.

We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it? Most fictional portrayals of life-extension simply tack more years on the end, in series. But that's a rather silly version. The future doesn't need a bunch of conservative old baby-boomers, hoarding money and getting in the grand-kids' way. What we really need is more life in parallel — some way to do all the things we want done. Picture splitting into three or four "selves" each morning, then reconverging into the same continuous person at the end of the day. What a wish fulfilment, to head off in several directions at once!

The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie.

A dragon’s inertia is not shifted by yanking its tail.

Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing — that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions.

Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself the victim of class war.

Some molecules were stable. . . . These became letters in a new alphabet.
They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few of which survived and accrued. . . . the first genetic words.

Experts were already casting doubt on an old dream — interstellar empire. If organic beings like us ever managed to voyage between stars, it would be through prodigious, exhausting effort. A tenacious species here and there might colonize a few dozen worlds with biological descendants. Even perhaps a small corner of the Milky Way. But hardly enough to dent the Fermi Paradox. Most organics would stay home.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.