Top 61 Stewart Brand Quotes
#1. All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
Stewart Brand
#2. One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.
Stewart Brand
#3. In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.
Stewart Brand
#4. Information wants to be free,because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
Stewart Brand
#5. Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.
Stewart Brand
#7. Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Stewart Brand
#8. Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.
Stewart Brand
#9. As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down - but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.
Stewart Brand
#10. Civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
Stewart Brand
#11. Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.
Stewart Brand
#12. There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
Stewart Brand
#13. The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
Stewart Brand
#14. It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).
Stewart Brand
#15. If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.
Stewart Brand
#16. Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.
Stewart Brand
#17. A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Stewart Brand
#18. The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.
Stewart Brand
#19. [Wind energy] takes a very large footprint on the land, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm.
Stewart Brand
#20. You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
Stewart Brand
#21. There should always be in sight the draw - a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
Stewart Brand
#22. We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand
#23. The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life.
Stewart Brand
#24. Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
Stewart Brand
#25. Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.
Stewart Brand
#27. The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it's deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they're the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn't even look good.
Stewart Brand
#28. In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads.
Stewart Brand
#29. If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.
Stewart Brand
#30. A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
Stewart Brand
#31. Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.
Stewart Brand
#32. The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet.
Stewart Brand
#33. How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?
Stewart Brand
#34. Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
Stewart Brand
#35. Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
Stewart Brand
#36. When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away.
Stewart Brand
#37. We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!
Stewart Brand
#38. Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
Stewart Brand
#39. Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
Stewart Brand
#40. The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.
Stewart Brand
#41. When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
Stewart Brand
#42. We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.
Stewart Brand
#43. The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
Stewart Brand
#44. When the government tries to run innovation, sometimes it does it well and sometimes it doesn't. So setting up a situation where the market runs innovation, which is a cap-and-trade idea, may well have more flexibility.
Stewart Brand
#45. To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.
Stewart Brand
#46. [On technology:] A realm of intimate, personal power is developing
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
Stewart Brand
#47. Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
Stewart Brand
#48. Long-time professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Chris Alexander
Stewart Brand
#49. Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.
Stewart Brand
#50. Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
Stewart Brand
#51. For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium; there are no previous masters to surpass; and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
Stewart Brand
#53. Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic
Stewart Brand
#54. Judaism says, "The Messiah is going to come, and that's the end of history"; Christianity says, "The Messiah is going to come back, and that's the end of history"; Islam says, "The Messiah came; history is irrelevant." One
Stewart Brand
#55. The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as "temporal exhaustion": "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.
Stewart Brand
#57. This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.
Stewart Brand
#58. Whenever I hear the word "share" I would reach for a gun if I had one. "Share" is frequently followed by the word "feelings", and I have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress yours.
Stewart Brand
#60. Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.
Stewart Brand
#61. Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Any
Stewart Brand
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
