Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

A mammal never forgets a hurt;

Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you're going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children's chances with you. That you'd left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.

a Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis.

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.

You can say that if you went crazy then you were crazy, and you couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. But that isn't the way it works, not in the real world. I mean, that's the sad thing about insane people; almost all of them know perfectly well that something is seriously wrong with them; that's what makes them so scared, so depressed. They know.

It is a pilgrim's spiral path leads to this mountain's brow...It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud...It is as if you trod with awe the face of a god turned up, unwittingly but helplessly, yielding to the laws of gravity. -Henry David Thoreau

The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture.

Something strange happened to me out there in the desert; I don't know what.

Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell." Aram

most economists are still working within the empty-world model of economics.

It's stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren't like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They'll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they'll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up.

To the locals, he realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.

nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth

They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency.

Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth.

history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking — an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.

It wasn't big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island

We just may have started a volcano!" "Is that good?" Coyote laughed wildly. "I don't know! But no one's ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it.

Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences.

bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit.

A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen

Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.