David Brin Quotes

I felt astonishment this system's folk put up with such a monarch. The attractions of kingship are well documented, but sentimental indulgence can become an illness if it isn't looked to.

Though his book vigorously promotes strong privacy, Miller notes that people routinely trade personal information for convenience or a few dollars of savings, even offering names of “friends and families” to commercial users, if it benefits them.

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chapter II, Part II

Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine … some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can’t keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot “know” the face-name-reps of ten billion people!

Inspired by these tiny sculptures, a few hyperfeminist mystics deduced a delightfully satisfying ideological fantasy—that an Earth-Mother religion preceded every other spiritual system, all over the planet. This Neolithic creed obviously worshipped a goddess of fecundity and maternal kindliness! Till gentle Gaia was toppled by violent bands of macho Jehovah-Zeus-Shiva followers, spurred by an abrupt wave of vile new technologies—metallurgy, agriculture, and literacy—that arrived with concurrent and destabilizing suddenness, shaking the tranquil old ways, toppling the pastoral mother goddess. It follows that every crime and catastrophe of recorded history stems from that upheaval.

Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphony—hinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

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

the towering standing wave that composes the symphony of thought.

Nothing is beyond us, the new legends say. So choose well.

For it is the nature of evil men that they are insatiable.

Simply replace that cutoff switch with one that would still block backflow into the grid, but that feeds from the solar inverter to just 2 or 3 outlets inside the home, running the fridge, some rechargers, and possibly satellite coms.

Of protein, phosphorus, nor even energy is there ever enough to slake all hungers. Therefore, show not affront when diverse beings vie over what physically exists. Only in thought can there be true generosity. So let thought be the focus of your world.

Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they’ll understand their children, and their children will understand them.

Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit.