Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.

What we need is equality without conformity.

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic .

It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.

You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated."Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!

You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.

The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.

Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.

Nothing was ever normal again.Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don’t you?

The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.

They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

...knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.