Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

the way like-minded people working to solve the same problem will engage in continuous civil war with each other over methods, thus destroying their chances of success.

Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them.

Only a stupid person would say that. Well, and yet I've just said it. Yes.

I can paint that fucking cave.

Era como si todos los ideales y los valores se fundieran bajo el peso del dinero, disolvente universal. Dinero, dinero, dinero. La falsa fungibilidad del dinero, la idea de que se puede comprar el sentido, o la vida.

historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation

Crap in the Cloud. A novel of celestial sewage.

to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive!

lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas.

Power wasn't a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.

That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip.

The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.

Hope would have to reside in something like this: hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.

See Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala for a vivid demonstration of why this is true.)

There have been mass delusions larger than this," I said, "following a fanatic leader.

It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.

But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

Round and round and round we go,  And where we stop, nobody knows.

Why don't you like it when you can't say why?

What's the point? we asked. No more fishing. Good, we said.

He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That's politics....

It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error.

He turned off the phone, returned it to the safe. He checked the particulate meter on the wall: 1300 ppm. This for fine particulates, 25 nanometers and smaller. He went out onto the street again, staying in the shade of buildings. Everyone was doing that; no one stood in the sun now. Gray air lay on the town like smoke. It was too hot to have a smell, there was just a scorched sensation, a smell like heat itself, like flame.