Stewart Brand Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.”

“When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.”

“When faced with a problem that is difficult to solve, it may be fruitful to ask ourselves: 'What would a microbe do?'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.
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“You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.”

“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, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.”

“A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.”

“A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.”

“Against the flow of constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progresses against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.”

“All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.”

“Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.”

“Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment?”

“Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.”

“Favor moves that increase options; shy from moves that end well but require cutting off choices; work from strong positions.”

“Function reforms form, perpetually.”

“Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are mortified by change.”

“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).”

“Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfect, which time treats cruelly.”

“Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.”

“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.”

“The house and its occupants mold to each other twenty-four hours a day, and the building accumulates the record of that intimacy.”

“The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity—over a century now—is Levi’s denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us?”

“The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you’re not pushed around when the next technology comes along.”

“To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.”

“Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.”

“Eternity is the opposite of a long time.”