108 Quotes by Stewart Brand

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

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.