Top 70 David Brin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The best time to act on this was decades ago. The second best time is now.”

— David Brin

2. “When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.”

— David Brin

3. “The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.”

— David Brin

4. “It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

— David Brin

5. “You don’t have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!”

— David Brin

6. “Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.”

— David Brin

7. “Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.”

— David Brin

8. “Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It’s happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.”

— David Brin

9. “Everything isn’t subjective. Reality also matters. Truth matters. It is still a word with meaning.”

— David Brin

10. “If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.”

— David Brin

11. “Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.”

— David Brin

12. “The fundamental premise of sci-fi is not spaceships and lasers – it’s that children can learn from the mistakes of their parents.”

— David Brin

13. “If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.”

— David Brin

14. “Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.”

— David Brin

15. “Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.”

— David Brin

16. “The village is coming back, like it or not.”

— David Brin

17. “Patience is fine, but I’m not going to stop asking the Universe to make sense!”

— David Brin

18. “If an outsider perceives ‘something wrong’ with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask ‘what mistake am I making?’ before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong.”

— David Brin

19. “Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”

— David Brin

20. “I find humans tremendously interesting.”

— David Brin

21. “Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.”

— David Brin

22. “It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.”

— David Brin

23. “Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.”

— David Brin

24. “Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.”

— David Brin

25. “It was called ‘the Big Lie’ technique, Johnny. Just sound like you know what you’re talking about – as if you’re citing real facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies into the shape of a conspiracy theory and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame – those with big but weak egos – will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts.”

— David Brin

26. “In the end, the work of diplomats continues even while others fight. So, it’s not necessarily true that everyone needs to march.”

— David Brin

27. “Prison for the crime of puberty – that was how secondary school had seemed.”

— David Brin

28. “Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.”

— David Brin

29. “I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.”

— David Brin

30. “Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?”

— David Brin

31. “Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.”

— David Brin

32. “In all of history, we have found just one cure for error – a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.”

— David Brin

33. “It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.”

— David Brin

34. “Change is the very fabric of our time.”

— David Brin

35. “Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ’enlightenment.”

— David Brin

36. “It’s how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.”

— David Brin

37. “Magic and art arise from an egomaniac’s insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.”

— David Brin

38. “Science gives man what he needs, but magic gives man what he wants.”

— David Brin

39. “Petals floating by, Drift through my woman’s hand, As she remembers me.”

— David Brin

40. “In the book, America had already been weakened by bio terror plagues before waves of selfish violence took down the rest. But the real enemy was the kind of male human being who nurses fantasies of violent glory at the expense of his fellow citizens.”

— David Brin

41. “We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it?”

— David Brin

42. “The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

— David Brin

43. “But it is a delightful challenge to try to depict interesting aliens.”

— David Brin

44. “As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the ‘eternal verities’ on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.”

— David Brin

45. “There was a time, in living memory, when this nation bestrode the planet like a titan.”

— David Brin

46. “I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings.”

— David Brin

47. “With gritty action and realistic science, Peter Watts brings to life a dark and vivid world.”

— David Brin

48. “Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction.”

— David Brin

49. “I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.”

— David Brin

50. “What point was there in pursuing an ever-elusive popularity?”

— David Brin