Stewart Brand famous quotes

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
-- Stewart Brand

#Library #Needs #Window

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

#Years #Extinction #Lasts

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
-- Stewart Brand

#Want #Information

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-- Stewart Brand

#Technology #Over You #New Technology

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.
-- Stewart Brand

#Fighting #Hands #Two

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

#Time #Powerful #Stress

Redefine the possible.
-- Stewart Brand

#Internet #Free Speech

You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
-- Stewart Brand

#Information #Cases

Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
-- Stewart Brand

#Civilization #Environmental #Attention

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
-- Stewart Brand

#Building #Predictions

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.
-- Stewart Brand

#Art #Conventions

Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student
-- Stewart Brand

#Style #Fool #Students

Information wants to be free,because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
-- Stewart Brand

#Information #Cost #Want

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
-- Stewart Brand

#Might #Wells

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

#Technology #Law #Four

When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
-- Stewart Brand

#Inspirational #Might #Generations

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

#California #Southern #Want

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

#Cutting #Technology #Artist

Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.
-- Stewart Brand

#Giving Up #Believe #Fighting

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

#Views #Answers #Honest

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?
-- Stewart Brand

#Block #House #Greek

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.
-- Stewart Brand

#Thinking #Long #Understanding

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

#Years #Growth #Environmental

[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

#Motivation #Inspiration #Squares

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

#Inspirational #Fantasy #Turns

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
-- Stewart Brand

#Fashion #Drama #Technology

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

#Waste #Coke #Energy

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

#Sight #Labyrinth #Kind

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

#Technology #Garden #Guilt

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
-- Stewart Brand

#Building

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

#Cities #Humanity #Unemployment

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

#Good Friend #Hard Times #Survival

Information wants to be free.
-- Stewart Brand

#Want #Information

How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?
-- Stewart Brand

#Unhappy #Way

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

#Dark #Age #Statistics

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

#Funny #Gun #Feelings

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

#God #Emotional #Soul