Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Interpretation
People tend to prioritize their own privacy while expecting others to be held accountable.
David Brin's quote reflects the inherent human tendency to seek personal privacy while simultaneously desiring transparency and accountability from others. This duality highlights a common conflict in social behavior, where individuals focus on their own interests and rights yet criticize similar behaviors in others, pointing to the complexities of societal norms regarding privacy and accountability.
In practice
In a discussion about social media ethics, this quote can highlight the hypocrisy in privacy expectations.
Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
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.
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
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.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love his country.
A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
We offer peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Hebrew nation for the common good of all.
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.