Quotes from David Brin

I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

Why is the future always Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in the future?

there were few worse criminals on any world than the engineer who blithely and knowingly hands over to a tyrant the tools of oppression.

Might human sapience be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said—"Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the fifty billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.

Obviously they thought their Lord was giving the haughty tirbeswoman

Concepts that had eluded him because they could not be shaped with images and feelings alone, but needed the rich subtlety of abstract language to shape and anchor them with a webbery of symbols.

June nodded. "Oh, now we know that. But then? The net was supposed to be their baby. Their tool! It would replace big banks as an instrument of control, above nations and governments. Above even money.

fact." For example, right after the 2016 U.S. election was trashed by malevolent forces, Facebook invited me to their headquarters to consult about ways to use transparency to prevent their site from being hijacked again by meme-manipulators. I can tell you now that absolutely none of my suggestions were adopted, or even closely examined. I am not encouraged

I had to admit, standing there, that sometimes you just gotta admire the passion of the truly insane -- a passion that bulls right past all sense or reason.

Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

Trouble is synonymous with being a metabolizing entity.

Dogmas don't have to be entirely logical, as long as they work.

In 1983, Michael W. Doyle commented on the common observation that democracies almost never wage war on one another. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon may be crucial to our hopes for preventing devastating conflict in the next generation. Which attributes of democracy foster this essential trait of mutual nonaggression?

Excuse me for being greedy, but I want freedom and good government.

Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!

Anything done in secret is more likely to result in terrible errors.