David Brin

Quotes

1. It is senseless to proclaim that it’s evil to make generalizations about groups. Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals. We have no right to pre-judge that a specific man can’t nurture, or a particular woman cannot fight.

   p. 562

2. 

   “All right,” she said. “You’ve convinced me. Men are good for something, after all.”

   p. 429

3. 

   They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.

   p. 512

4. 

   A dragon’s inertia is not shifted by yanking its tail.

   p. 551

5. 

   The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she’d been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.

   p. 337

6. 

   It is dangerous these days for a male to write even glancingly on feminist themes. Did anyone attack Margaret Atwood’s right to extrapolate religio-machismo in The Handmaid’s Tale? Women writers appear vouchsafed insight into the souls of men—credit that seldom flows the other way. It is a sexist and offensive assumption, which does not advance understanding.

   p. 561

7. 

   Wisdom. No match for the troublemaker Curiosity.

   p. 265

8. 

   Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you.

   p. 155

9. 

   “I thought they were very good at what they did.”

   ”Of course they were good!” Brill glanced sharply. “The issue is what one chooses to be good at. The arts are fine, for hobbies. I play six instruments, myself. But they pose no great challenge to a mature mind.”

   p. 545

10. 

    Is there an inverse relation between knowledge and wisdom? At times it seems the more we know, the less we understand.

    I am not the first to note this quandary. One scholar recently wrote, “Lysos and her followers chase the siren call of pastoralism, like countless romantics before them, idealizing a past Golden Age that never was, pursuing a serenity possible only in the imagination.”

    p. 502

11. 

    Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content.

    p. 150

12. 

    In the end, both extremes had more in common with each other than either did with the middle.

    p. 470