Quote

Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.

Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: December 14
Biologist
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Rockford
Illinois
Times
Absolute
Formula
Certain
Discipline
Mystical
Give
Meaning
Formulas
Giving
Especially
Provides
Kind
Gives
Version
Fealty
Believe
Fight
Versions
Blinkered
Never
Knowledge
Absolutes
Transformative
Life
Fighting
Disaster
Illusory

More quotes by Stewart Brand

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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.
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There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
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You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
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Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
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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.
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There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
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All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
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Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
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A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
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Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
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Redefine the possible.
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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.
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We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
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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.
Stewart Brand
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Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.
Stewart Brand
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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.
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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.
Stewart Brand
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A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
Stewart Brand
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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.
Stewart Brand
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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.
Stewart Brand