Stewart Brand Quotes

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

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

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.

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

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

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.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

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.

One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.

There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.

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

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

When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.

Redefine the possible.

Information wants to be free.

The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet.

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

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

[Wind energy] takes a very large footprint on the land, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm.

Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.

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

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.

This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.

Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.

As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down - but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.

You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.

Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.

There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.

When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.

Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

We can influence the future but not see it.

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

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

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

When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away.

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