Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938, in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

Sourced

• We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
  • Opening sentence of the Purpose of the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog.

• In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.
  • Whole Earth Epilog (1974), "History", p. 753

• 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.
  • Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49. (Cited as origin of the aphorism "information wants to be free" by Roger Clarke in "Information Wants to be Free".)

• Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
  • Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 216.