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. – David Brin
Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses? – David Brin
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. Ive had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam… and Im not happy to be right in all of those cases. – David Brin
Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. – James Buchan
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. – David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country