David Brin Quotes
-
'It’s magic,' the chief cook concluded, in awe.'No, not magic,' the ship’s doctor replied. 'It’s much more. It’s mathematics.'
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
'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.'
-
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?
-
A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.
-
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.
-
Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you.
-
'Where there is mind, there is always solution,' Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.
-
A sane being wished for peace and serenity, not to be the mortar in which the ingredients of destiny are finely ground.
-
They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.
-
In the end, both extremes had more in common with each other than either did with the middle.
-
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.
-
From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.
-
Life is not fair...Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse.
-
'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.
-
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.
-
'They accepted warriors...' he emphasized, '...That divinely mad type that’s so valuable when needed, and such a problem when it’s not.'
-
It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.
-
Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphony-hinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.
-
Intelligence is loose in the galaxy. Power is in our hands, for better or worse. We can modify Nature’s rules, if we dare, but we cannot ignore her lessons.
-
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.
-
What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.
-
What hope has any endeavor which is based on hate and fear?