Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.

A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.

That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet.

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

So, you know, Fermi's paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it's too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won't work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn't you? It doesn't even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You'll never hear back. So that's my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan's Answer.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental.

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

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.

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

The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone.

It's the love of right lures men to wrong.

One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.

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

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.

teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

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

Make up a recipe for a successful revolution. Take large masses of injustice, resentment and frustration. Put them in a week or failing hegemon. Sir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.

Sax had always been so uninterested in [power and gain] that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend all one's time protecting it.

When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do? People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let's go to the lake and swim.

We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.

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!

Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.