Quotes from David Brin

It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.

The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct.

It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.

Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.

Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself the victim of class war.

Humorists are precisely the kinds of guys who can cut through the orgy of petty indignation that the aging baby boomers are imposing on this great country.

Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom?

Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago… for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don't love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They'll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.

The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture – although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were underrated.

If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them.

Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows, for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then. We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at a sword we ourselves forged, and know, with absolute certainty, it is real...

Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine Ã¢â'¬Â¦ some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can't keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot "know" the face-name-reps of ten billion people!

The notion of a universe filled with cowards... who stay cowardly FOREVER, no matter how advanced they become... seems no[t] only unimaginative and temporally myopic, but deeply dismal, as well.

Your faith in Homo technologicus -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth's caretakers.

Redundancy is blessed, but efficiency is divine.

Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them?

Hardly a cent has been allocated for compliance assistance in any of the red states that passed these new voter ID laws.  Hardly one red cent. You liberals out there. Don't make this a matter of goody-goody preaching, or denying a long term need to ratchet up ID accountability. Make it about hypocrisy.

Science gives man what he needs, but magic gives man what he wants.

Of course Soros is a criminal mastermind whose NGOs suckered millions around the world into raving socialist frenzy. Never mind that his wealth and media "empire" are minuscule compared to the triumvirate of Murdoch, Koch and Saudi co-owners of Fox.

Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben