Stewart Brand Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-time professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Chris Alexander

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

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

Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Any

Information wants to be free.

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.

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

Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic

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

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

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

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

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

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

Redefine the possible.

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

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

Function reforms form, perpetually.

We can influence the future but not see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.