Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

A map is the representation of a landscape, after all, and many landscapes, like Orange County's, are principally psychic.

Heather the midwife, the herb woman, the loudmouth, the witch, the crone, the horrible hag, the deadly poisoner. A very busy and bossy old woman, small and bent and proud to have three teeth left, two opposed. The spider was her animal, and it was said she turned into one sometimes.

at the end of every month or two . . ., the British had a whole Vietnam Memorial's worth of dead. Every month or two, for 51 months.

Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma'adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.

I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this?

Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It's crowdsourced, it's democratic, it's capitalism, it's the market.

I'm told finance doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it's more just advanced programming

A Vietnam Memorial's worth of civilians in an instantaneous flash. . . . When the crew of the Enola Gay landed, they celebrated with a barbeque.

the name for a certain kind of fiscal decapitation is called taking a haircut, which clarifies just how minor and even trivial are most of the financial limitations on wealth that get considered in the neoliberal hegemony.

It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...

and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since.

as a class it is suffering, one could argue, from guilt, anxiety, depression, shame, a surfeit of everything, a sense of irredeemable criminal culpability, and so on. So to put this class out of its misery would be to relieve the individuals in that class from that horrible psychic burden, and possibly release them to a fuller happier life as guilt-free humans on a planet of equally guilt-free humans.

I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort." —The Dalai Lama

Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Novy Mir—none of it. Her mother's face across the kitchen

I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big." "I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn't do it thinking, Hey, now that I'm president I'll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?

Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren't the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

the seven generations rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.

Looking around the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving--beating very lightly--a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.

It's a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.

but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

ease of representation. It's always more than what you see, bigger than what you know. That said, people in this era did do it.