Stewart Brand Quotes

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.

The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.

We can influence the future but not see it.

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.

Redefine the possible.

How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?

For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium; there are no previous masters to surpass; and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

Whenever I hear the word "share" I would reach for a gun if I had one. "Share" is frequently followed by the word "feelings", and I have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress yours.

In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.

Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student

Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?

We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!