"A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window."
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Quote collection
Stewart Brand quotes (page 1 of 3)
51 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet."
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"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."
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"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
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"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."
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"A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start."
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"All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that."
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"Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time."
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"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."
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"Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers."
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"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."
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"When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away."
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"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."
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