Quotes from David Brin

Read again or hear a great actor speak aloud Lincoln's Gettysburg Address[141] – only this time envision he's talking to you, right now. No squinting. No adjustments or allowances for time or context. Simply talking exactly to and about us, right now. It's shockingly pertinent. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

At last, a kind of immortality could be achieved by anybody who learned the new trick of recording their words and thoughts and stories, by marking impressions in wet clay. The immortality of speaking across time and space, even long after your original body returned to dust.

Once you consider the premise that Episodes I through III are not live-action movies with extensive special effects, but rather animated features with a few living actors rotoscoped in, many of the more common critical objections to the movies simply wither away.

read it aloud to that teetering RASR (Residually Adult-Sane Republican) … and explain that yes, this is how we feel, ever more, each day in the face of soul-destroying, nation-wrecking treason by a madness that – like the 1860s Confederacy – is without any moral foundation, whatsoever. Tell your ostrich Republican friends, they need to choose sides in this potentially lethal phase of our endless Civil War.

one by Alasdair Gray – relayed by my colleague, author Ken McLeod[143] – that sums everything so-concisely and optimistically, but with a slightly science-fictional flair: "Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.

Leaving was out of the question, of course. A combination of pride, obstinacy, and simple gonadal fury rooted him in his tracks. Here he would do battle, and that was that.

Alas, there truly are conspirators in this world, flourishing wherever light doesn't shine. Moreover, they developed a great technique to distract from their own plots – they help spread a stinging miasma of paranoid ravings that genuine schemes can hide behind!

In other words, I look through my eyes and see only a version of the world, a version that can be, and often is, colored or twisted by what I want to see.  Another person may witness the same events, and yet observe something entirely different.

like when two or three human beings decided to marry and raise a family

And if you aren't a dues paying member of a dozen NGOs, each fighting for a future you believe in, then take another look at the hypocrite in the mirror. That method is a lazy person's cheap route to bragging rights: "I'm at least doing something." Here's how.

By one way of reckoning, we transformed several hundred cubic kilometers of fossil fuels into two cubic kilometers of human beings.

nous pouvons nous doter de garanties constitutionnelles, établir une stricte répartition des pouvoirs, mais de telles mesures ne prennent un sens que lorsque les citoyens assurent que ces garde-fous soient respectés. Or, ceux qui ont soif de puissance et d'argent sont sans cesse à l'affût d'un moyen de violer les lois ou de les tourner à leur avantage.

Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.

Demonstrating some of the proposed new techniques of encrypted uniqueness verification that can be embedded in each customer's use-copy of a given work.

Give up," they preached. "Don't bother trying to figure out how the flawed world works. Perfect knowledge is to be found only within the mind, the soul. Seek your own private salvation then, apart from the world, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to piece together the nuts and bolts of God's handiwork.

Look. Studies show FEAR sets attitudes/tolerance to change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange. Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of Dreams.

I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True... but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn't true!  Moreover, I can improve my model of the world, by slowly, carefully finding out what is truer than what I already know.

Let me repeat: I know there are conspiracies! Indeed, it's laughable to ignore the most blatant one called Fox News, which openly works for a mélange of foreign billionaires, from the Saudis to Russian mafiosi, from Macao casino lords to an Australian deceit mogul.

Of protein, phosphorus, nor even energy is there ever enough to slake all hungers. Therefore, show not affront when diverse beings vie over what physically exists. Only in thought can there be true generosity. So let thought be the focus of your world.

We have earned our peace. It is, by now, more precious than honor, or even pity.

It takes great wisdom, maturity, and force of will to overcome ingrained human egotism and say -- "Hey, I can fool myself! I might even be wrong, from time to time." 

The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being.

We modern folk snort at the superstitions of our ancestors. We know they could never really wreck the world, but we can! Zeus or Moloch could not match the destructive power of a nuclear missile exchange, or a dusting of plague bacilli, or some ecological travesty, or ruinous mismanagement of the intricate aiconomy. Oh, we're mighty. But are we so different from our forebears?

David Axelrod put it well, citing how we respond to every Trumpian or Fox News provocation with righteous indignation: [2] "My advice to the Democratic nominee next year is: Don't play. … Wrestling is Mr. Trump's preferred form of combat. But beating him will require jiu-jitsu, a different style of battle typically defined as the art of manipulating an opponent's force against himself…." Absolutely. Moreover, it must begin with un-learning