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"There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives."
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"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texa...s? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

"Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain."

"Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again."

"It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature."

"I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research."

"Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."

"I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen."

"I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you."

"Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves."
Explore more quotes by David Brin

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

"One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events."

"Above all, TRIBES is fun, and even kind of sexy... in that every round features an Opportunity for Reproduction, which is the main aim of the game, as it is in most of Nature."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"
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