David Brin Quotes

If you over-react to a crisis legislatively it generally ends in disaster.

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.

If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it's obviously going to be a disaster.

At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

The fountain of youth is like the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacobs story. It never ends well.

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

An orchestra full of stars can be a disaster.

Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

We are the greatest computers in this world, but now we've created the smart phone which is smarter than us now, but we're still making dumb decisions. We have given our creations more power than we have, and that to me is dumb.

I have a certain manner of speech that is unique to me. I tried once to have my staff tweet for me, and it was a disaster! People knew right away that it wasn't me.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

I had no idea that we were saying anything important until they told us to stop.

This is a tragedy among human history, the result of large numbers of human errors.

Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the ocean?

Let's face it: the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies oftentimes when they had no violent crimes.

If people start to buy the idea that machines are great companions for the elderly or for children, as they increasingly seem to do, we are really playing with fire.

Obamacare became the disaster that its detractors always said that it would become.