Quotes from David Brin

We can't save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

But I'm now convinced the never-negotiate radicalism of today's mad right – promoted avidly on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and by memes pouring from Kremlin basements, and even institutionalized openly by many Republican leaders – leaves us no choice. It's become a knife-fight. Any reaching out will just win us a bloody stump.

Responsibility was our cruel mooring....

Nothing is beyond us, the new legends say. So choose well.

Some molecules were stable. . . . These became letters in a new alphabet. They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few of which survived and accrued. . . . the first genetic words.

what was the very first injunction laid by the Lord upon our first ancestor? . . . name all the beasts .

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

Like California . . . contemporary New Zealand had gradually transformed its longstanding tradition of tolerance into a positive fetish for eccentricity.

How strange. Humans always seem so much in control. Is it just a grand act, to fool both others and themselves?

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

mongrels . . . people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it. You know . . . like Californians.

Simply replace that cutoff switch with one that would still block backflow into the grid, but that feeds from the solar inverter to just 2 or 3 outlets inside the home, running the fridge, some rechargers, and possibly satellite coms.

Each of us remains convinced that our own subjective viewpoint is more urgent than anyone else's—indeed, even more valid than the objective matrix that underlies so-called reality. After all, the subjective view is a grand theater. Each of us gets to be hero of an ongoing drama. It's why ideologies and bigotries survive against all evidence or logic.

Heck, picture if aliens ever landed in California. Instead of running away or even inquiring about the secrets of the universe, Californians would probably ask the BEMs if they had any new cuisine.

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.

Oh, subjective obstinacy had advantages, Morris, when we were busy evolving into nature's champion egotists. It led to human mastery over the planet Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and several times to our species nearly wiping itself out.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children's children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

The variety of inventive ideas—and ideologies—that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they're stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That's how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist.

Government . . . consists of a nation's efforts to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens.

d'un homme qui a perdu tout ce qu'il aimait et qui, depuis, n'est plus tout à fait de ce monde.

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