John Brockman Quotes

#1. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and

John Brockman

#2. After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, "The End is Not Near.

John Brockman

#3. It's an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness.

John Brockman

#4. Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.

John Brockman

#5. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

John Brockman

#6. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

John Brockman

#7. I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.

John Brockman

#8. By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.

John Brockman

#9. Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

John Brockman

#10. Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.

John Brockman

#11. That's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

John Brockman

#12. Narcissistic leaders. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction is a state. When a state is taken over by a leader with the classic triad of narcissistic symptoms - grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy - the result can be imperial adventures with enormous human costs.

John Brockman

#13. Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation,

John Brockman

#14. Is likely to survive for another 100 billion years or more.

John Brockman

#15. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

John Brockman

#16. I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?

John Brockman

#17. Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.

John Brockman

#18. It's natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.

John Brockman

#19. Computers are fine, but it's time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains.

John Brockman

#20. What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules - and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.

John Brockman

#21. Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up.

John Brockman

#22. You may know that a prisoner's guilt is independent of whether you're hungry or not, but she'll still seem like a better parole candidate when you've recently had a snack.

John Brockman

#23. Twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.

John Brockman

#24. We'd be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did.

John Brockman

#25. Income is an important determinant of people's satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent.

John Brockman

#26. They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism," he

John Brockman

#27. Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.

John Brockman

#28. Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.

John Brockman

#29. Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

John Brockman

#30. it is difficult to discern where "you" end and the remainder of the world begins.

John Brockman

#31. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

John Brockman

#32. Plus, where would the universe retire to? Florida isn't big enough.

John Brockman

#33. Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted.

John Brockman

#34. Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity.

John Brockman