David Brin Quotes
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She had called in the debt that parents owe a child for bringing her, unasked, into a strange world. One should never make an offer without knowing full well what will happen if it is accepted.
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There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true?No, it can’t. Besides, you're awake now.
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It’s said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
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'This is a lovely world,' he sighed. 'And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect.'
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'All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’...what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.'
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In all of history, we have found just one cure for error-a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.
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He read about humanity’s age-old racial struggles. Had it really been less than half a millennium since humans contrived gigantic, fatuous lies about each other simply because of pigment shades, and killed millions because they believed their own lies?
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'After all,' he muttered, 'what can they do to shake the confidence of a fellow who’s got delusions of adequacy?'
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'Huh,' Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society.
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'Life is the continuation of existence, yet no thing endures. We are all patterns, seeking to propagate. Patterns which bring other patterns into being, then vanish, as if we’ve never been.'
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Apparently, the Fates were not so unsubtle as to deal him another blow just yet. He knew they didn’t operate that way. They always let you hope for a while longer, then strung it out before they really let you have it.
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Beware of assumptions that seem 'obvious' in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.
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Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.
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A sane being wished for peace and serenity, not to be the mortar in which the ingredients of destiny are finely ground.
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I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.
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What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.
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They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.
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Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you.
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'Where there is mind, there is always solution,' Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.
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What hope has any endeavor which is based on hate and fear?
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'They accepted warriors...' he emphasized, '...That divinely mad type that’s so valuable when needed, and such a problem when it’s not.'
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It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
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Life is not fair...Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse.
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There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption. Ho Chi Minh never underestimated America. His avowed hero was George Washington and he remained in awe of the U.S., all his life. He remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.