Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

Sheer dumb sentience.

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages

Götterdämmerung Syndrome

Things are sold for less than it costs to make them. ... lots of business do go bankrupt. The ones that don't haven't actually sold their thing for more than it costs to make. They've just ignored some of their costs. ... they shove some of their production costs off their books.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental. To be out at dawn was important.

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real conditions of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works.

Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange…they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. "We'll call it Martian orange," Maya decided.

It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even any balconies. The oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their trip.

nor did he become obsessed with photography like so many other clients did, fussing with rolls and exposures until they did not seem to be seeing anything outside at all.

even Deinococcus radiodurans perishes in it.

But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra—an orchestrion, an orchestrina—whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo—

Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn't obvious how to do it.

Sometimes," she said, wiping her eyes, "sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I've done." Michel sat beside her. "We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?

Art should be used to change things.

Some mistakes you never can make good.

Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem.

But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free self.

And my job needs a fair bit of lying, to tell the truth. - What are you, a reporter?

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.

Historical explanation is not just a matter of the practice of historians, but of the nature of reality. And in reality, physical events are constrained by general laws — or if they are not laws, they are at least extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the links between an event and those that follow it, allowing predictions that, if not deterministically exact, are still accurate enough to give us enormous power over physical reality.

Capitalism: after a long and vigorous life, now incurable, living in pain. In a coma; become a zombie; without a plan; without any hope of returning to health. So you put it out of its misery.

after over a century of such noise, the windy silence of the outdoors was strange, a kind of aural hollowness.

Experimentation had made it clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum reality were an integral part of consciousness.