Stewart Brand > Quotes

“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”
― Stewart Brand

“A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Information wants to be free.”
― Stewart Brand

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”
― Stewart Brand

“If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.”
― Stewart Brand

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
― Stewart Brand

“Function reforms form, perpetually.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”
― Stewart Brand

“The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.”
― Stewart Brand

“The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as “temporal exhaustion”: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “the long term” is measured at least in centuries.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“[On technology:] A realm of intimate, personal power is developing -- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”
― Stewart Brand

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.”
― Stewart Brand

“Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Eternity is the opposite of a long time.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That’s why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space becomes completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.”
― Stewart Brand, The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“We’re engaging in a set of activities which go way beyond the individual life span, way beyond children, grandchildren, way beyond parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to the whole frame of at least civilizational life. Once you get comfortable with that, then you start to go further out still, to three and a half billion years of life on Earth, and maybe we’ll do another three and a half billion years. That’s kind of interesting to try to hold in your mind. And once you’ve held it in your mind, what do you do on Monday?”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary

“We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“California was a great place to get over mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Such an endless parade of gurus and mystics came through, peddling their wares, that they canceled each other out. They couldn't compete with the drugs, and the drugs canceled each other out as well. Fervent visions, shared to excess, became clanking clichés. All that was left was daily reality, with its endless negotiation, devoid of absolutes, but alive with surprises.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

“Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don’t need to be smart to be dangerous.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“The scale of forces, this time, is planetary; the scope is centuries; the stakes are what we call civilization; and it is all taking place at the headlong speed of self-accelerating human technologies and climatic turbulence. Talk of “saving the planet” is overstated, however. Earth will be fine, no matter what; so will life. It is humans who are in trouble. But since we got ourselves into this fix, we should be able to get ourselves out of it.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary

“Humans perpetually fight, LeBlanc says, because they always outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment and then have to fight over resources.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary

“But all of that civilized sophistication could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere are lowered by severe climate change. Humanity would revert to its norm of constant battles for diminishing resources. Peace lovers would be killed and eaten by war lovers.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary