Stewart Brand Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.”

“Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.”

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.”

“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.”

“How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?”

“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.”

“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.”

“If the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.”

“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.”

“In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That’s why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.”

“Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

“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.”

“Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.”

“Redefine the possible.”

“Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly”

“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.”

“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.”

“The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet.”

“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.”

“There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.”

“There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.”

“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.”

“Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.”

“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.”

“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!”