David Brin quotes

What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.

Step back for a minute and note an important piece of psychohistory — that every generation of Americans faced adversaries who called us "decadent cowards and pleasure-seeking sybarites (wimps), devoid of any of the virtues of manhood."
Elsewhere, I mark out this pattern, showing how every hostile nation, leader or meme had to invest in this story, for a simple reason. Because Americans were clearly happier, richer, smarter, more successful and far more free than anyone else. Hence, either those darned Yanks must know a better way of living (unthinkable!)... or else they must have traded something for all those surface satisfactions.
Something precious. Like their cojones. Or their souls. A devil's bargain. And hence — (our adversaries told themselves) — those pathetic American will fold up, like pansies, as soon as you give them a good push.
It is the one uniform trait shown by every* vicious, obstinate and troglodytic enemy of the American Experiment. A wish fantasy that convinced Hitler and Stalin and the others that urbanized, comfortable New Yorkers and Californians and all the rest cannot possibly have any guts, not like real men. A delusion shared by the King George, the plantation-owners, the Nazis, Soviets and so on, down to Saddam and Osama bin Laden. A delusion that our ancestors disproved time and again, decisively — though not without a lot of pain.

This is very similar to the expression by Frank Herbert in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985): "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

"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."

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

“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’...what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”

"Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear."

He wasn’t afraid of dying, only of having not done all he could, and not properly spitting in the eye of death when it came for him. That final gesture was important.

Every marvel of our age arose out of the critical give and take of an open society. No other civilization ever managed to incorporate this crucial innovation, weaving it into daily life. And if you disagree with this ... say so!

Had I been wrong, this would still have been the honorable thing to do.
I am very glad, however, to find out that I was right.

“Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society.

Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.

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.

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.

She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

The man talked, but somehow nothing he said seemed to make any sense.

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.

A sane being wished for peace and serenity, not to be the mortar in which the ingredients of destiny are finely ground.

There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.
So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true?
No, it can’t. Besides, you're awake now.