David Brin Quotes

#1. David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

Bruce Sterling

#2. All this talk of using tax policy to 'assess social costs' ... what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.

David Brin

#3. Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them?

David Brin

#4. 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.

David Brin

#5. I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

David Brin

#6. Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.

David Brin

#7. When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.

David Brin

#8. Obviously they thought their Lord was giving the haughty tirbeswoman

David Brin

#9. It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.

David Brin

#10. One of life's joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks ... who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it.

David Brin

#11. As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave ... an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

David Brin

#12. Freedom was wonderful beyond relief. But with it came that bitch, Duty.

David Brin

#13. Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author's product. The real universe ain't that way, and neither are my fictive ones.

David Brin

#14. What point was there in pursuing an ever-elusive popularity?

David Brin

#15. Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction.

David Brin

#16. Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben

David Brin

#17. It takes great wisdom, maturity, and force of will to overcome ingrained human egotism and say
"Hey, I can fool myself! I might even be wrong, from time to time."

David Brin

#18. We have earned our peace. It is, by now, more precious than honor, or even pity.

David Brin

#19. With gritty action and realistic science, Peter Watts brings to life a dark and vivid world.

David Brin

#20. Fortunately, human beings are remarkably diverse models to work from.

David Brin

#21. The fundamental premise of sci-fi is not spaceships and lasers - it's that children can learn from the mistakes of their parents.

David Brin

#22. Petals floating by, Drift through my woman's hand, As she remembers me.

David Brin

#23. But Orpheus failed because, like all pakeha, he just couldn't keep his mind on one thing at a time.

David Brin

#24. When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

David Brin

#25. Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

David Brin

#26. Excuse me for being greedy, but I want freedom and good government.

David Brin

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

David Brin

#28. You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

David Brin

#29. Where is it written that one should only care about big things?

David Brin

#30. Magic and art arise from an egomaniac's insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.

David Brin

#31. Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam ... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.

David Brin

#32. Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

David Brin

#33. So if it appears that my argument supports the necessity of lawyers, please accept that I say it with reluctant awareness that things would be worse without them.

David Brin

#34. My education and background thoroughly inform my writing.

David Brin

#35. We are, at our core, information pack rats and inveterate correlators.

David Brin

#36. Prison for the crime of puberty
that was how secondary school had seemed.

David Brin

#37. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being.

David Brin

#38. Demonstrating some of the proposed new techniques of encrypted uniqueness verification that can be embedded in each customer's use-copy of a given work.

David Brin

#39. Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

David Brin

#40. Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

David Brin

#41. Once you consider the premise that Episodes I through III are not live-action movies with extensive special effects, but rather animated features with a few living actors rotoscoped in, many of the more common critical objections to the movies simply wither away.

David Brin

#42. There were few worse criminals on any world than the engineer who blithely and knowingly hands over to a tyrant the tools of oppression.

David Brin

#43. Keep as few secrets as possible. The remaining ones will be easier to protect.

David Brin

#44. I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True ... but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn't true! Moreover, I can improve my model of the world, by slowly, carefully finding out what is truer than what I already know.

David Brin

#45. The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct.

David Brin

#46. There isn't one America anymore. If there ever had been.

David Brin

#47. In good times, pessimism is a luxury; but in bad times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling and fatal prophecy.

David Brin

#48. I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.

David Brin

#49. Responsibility was our cruel mooring....

David Brin

#50. The village is coming back, like it or not.

David Brin

#51. Would we be tormenting ourselves over the Kennedy assassination today if fifty cameras had been rolling, instead of just poor Abraham Zapruder's?

David Brin

#52. Change is the very fabric of our time.

David Brin

#53. Self-righteousness is an especially heady condition that all of us have experienced at one time or another. Those who are honest will admit there is something sickly-sweet and alluring about knowing you are right, while others are terribly wrong.

David Brin

#54. If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.

David Brin

#55. There was a time, in living memory, when this nation bestrode the planet like a titan.

David Brin

#56. Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

David Brin

#57. It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.

David Brin

#58. Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as 'enlightenment.

David Brin

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

David Brin

#60. The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

David Brin

#61. A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.

David Brin

#62. There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

David Brin

#63. It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

David Brin

#64. Science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.

David Brin

#65. 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.

David Brin

#66. Metaphorically speaking, some very bright people suggest that citizens of the twenty-first century will be best protected by masks and shields, while I prefer the image of a light saber.

David Brin

#67. a species used to strict patterns of inherited hierarchy.

David Brin

#68. Science gives man what he needs, but magic gives man what he wants.

David Brin

#69. She had called in the debt that parents owe a child for bringing her, unasked, into a strange world. One should never make an offer without knowing full well what will happen if it is accepted.

David Brin

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

David Brin

#71. Life is not fair ... Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse.

David Brin

#72. Dogmas don't have to be entirely logical, as long as they work.

David Brin

#73. Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

David Brin

#74. 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.

David Brin

#75. I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings.

David Brin

#76. Your neighbors are not all sheep. Your political opponents are not all evil or fools. Try talking to those you despise. They are your fellow citizens. And together, we are not lesser than any "greatest generation.".

David Brin

#77. Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear.

David Brin

#78. If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.

David Brin

#79. But it is a delightful challenge to try to depict interesting aliens.

David Brin

#80. The best time to act on this was decades ago. The second best time is now.

David Brin

#81. 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?

David Brin

#82. The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.

David Brin

#83. It may be that the best time for Otherness has already passed. Clearly part of the basis for this renaissance has been wealth, especially the unprecedented comfort enjoyed by the vast majority of Westerners since World War II, in which very few of us can even conceive of starving

David Brin

#84. In the end, the work of diplomats continues even while others fight. So, it's not necessarily true that everyone needs to march.

David Brin

#85. Above all, TRIBES is fun, and even kind of sexy ... in that every round features an Opportunity for Reproduction, which is the main aim of the game, as it is in most of Nature.

David Brin

#86. I had to admit, standing there, that sometimes you just gotta admire the passion of the truly insane
a passion that bulls right past all sense or reason.

David Brin

#87. If an outsider perceives 'something wrong' with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask 'what mistake am I making?' before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong.

David Brin

#88. We aren't a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries ... her ambition and her heart. Her voice. So sing. (556)

David Brin

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

David Brin

#90. Humorists are precisely the kinds of guys who can cut through the orgy of petty indignation that the aging baby boomers are imposing on this great country.

David Brin

#91. Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true - in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.

David Brin

#92. In the book, America had already been weakened by bio terror plagues before waves of selfish violence took down the rest. But the real enemy was the kind of male human being who nurses fantasies of violent glory at the expense of his fellow citizens.

David Brin

#93. The notion of a universe filled with cowards ... who stay cowardly FOREVER, no matter how advanced they become ... seems no[t] only unimaginative and temporally myopic, but deeply dismal, as well.

David Brin

#94. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

David Brin

#95. Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the Universe to make sense!

David Brin

#96. 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.

David Brin

#97. It was a strange trek - the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.

David Brin

#98. Everything isn't subjective. Reality also matters. Truth matters. It is still a word with meaning.

David Brin

#99. Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable - and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

David Brin

#100. It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

David Brin