Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.

Stewart Brand

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

Stewart Brand

library window needs

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.

Stewart Brand

stress powerful time

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

Stewart Brand

service-culture technology over-you

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.

Stewart Brand

extinction lasts years

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

Stewart Brand

problem absence world

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Stewart Brand

fighting two hands

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

Stewart Brand

building

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

Stewart Brand

predictions building

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.

Stewart Brand

motivation energy inspiration

Whenever I hear the word "share" I would reach for a gun if I had one. "Share" is frequently followed by the word "feelings", and I have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress yours.

Stewart Brand

smart clever funny

Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.

Stewart Brand

convenient computer humans

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.

Stewart Brand

honest views answers

Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Stewart Brand

information cost want

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.

Stewart Brand

cutting technology artist

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

Stewart Brand

information expensive want

We can influence the future but not see it.

Stewart Brand

influence

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

Stewart Brand

understanding long thinking

Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.

Stewart Brand

tools ends use

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

Stewart Brand

god-and-nature fantasy inspirational

You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.

Stewart Brand

information cases