Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

And yet we do sometimes see demonstrations, sometimes quite large ones. Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.

If you're in Congress, don't you have to be there sometimes?

Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.

We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Well," Amelia said, "basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.

Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.

Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.

All that stuff you want to forget as if it never happened, the Nazi gold, the Jewish gold, the tax havens for oligarchs and kleptocrats, the secret bank accounts for criminals of all kinds.

Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And

He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.

Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we're patriots! At least we're self-reliant and we can

The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer.

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries. Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming.

We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.

Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.

Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility

that until you know for sure what the outcomes of a decision will be, you can't decide what to do.

Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.

Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s.

He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.