STEWART BRAND

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

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

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

Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.

In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads.

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

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.

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.

Information wants to be free.

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.

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

The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.

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

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

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

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

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life.

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

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?

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.

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

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.

We can influence the future but not see it.

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