David Brin Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

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.

David Brin
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

David Brin
We can't save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

David Brin
It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

David Brin
Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the Universe to make sense!

David Brin
He tried again, but their sullen, rural obstinacy was impervious to logic.

David Brin
I hate the whole übermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.

David Brin
A sane being wished for peace and serenity, not to be the mortar in which the ingredients of destiny are finely ground.

David Brin
It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.

David Brin
Of course we can establish constitutional checks and balances, but those won't mean a thing unless citizens make sure the safeguards are taken seriously. The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.

David Brin
The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some 'norm'), the freedom to learn from experience... to be influenced by reasonable arguments... and the appeal to the emotions... and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns.

David Brin
What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?
Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.

David Brin
Of course, sometimes a species' invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.
Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots...
The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.
So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.

David Brin
Knowledge isn't restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn't need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.

David Brin
After all, he muttered, what can they do to shake the confidence of a fellow who's got delusions of adequacy?

David Brin
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.

David Brin
It also became clear why the nations were expected to commence major space enterprises. Henceforth, the raw materials for industrial civilization were to be taken from Earth's lifeless sisters, not the mother world. All mines currently being gouged through Terra's crust were to be phased out within a generation and no new ones started. Henceforth, Earth must be preserved for the real treasures—its species—and man would have to look elsewhere for mere baubles like gold or platinum or iron.

David Brin
They accepted warriors... he emphasized,... That divinely mad type that's so valuable when needed, and such a problem when it's not.

David Brin
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.

David Brin
Petals floating by, Drift through my woman's hand, As she remembers me.

David Brin
Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

David Brin
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.

David Brin
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.

David Brin
Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.

David Brin
Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn't take everything else to the grave with it.

David Brin
The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker's damn about anything as large as a planet.

David Brin
Where there is mind, there is always solution, Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.

David Brin
What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.

David Brin
Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.

David Brin
Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear.

David Brin