Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?

Another man said I don't own my kids' teacher, I don't own my doctor, I don't need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

Look!" Galileo commanded. "You take the focal length of the objective—for this one, a hundred minims—and you divide that by the focal length of the eyepiece, in this case eleven minims—and you get a number which identifies the device's power of magnification, thus here about nine times! It's a ratio! It's geometry again—

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive

indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed.

I consider my novels, amongst many other things, to be my political activism.

That's the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That's crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it's the system that has to change.

Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of the Earth. Not a genius.

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game;

Went to the whiteboard and tried to show her how AI could help. Always awkward to explain things to computer illiterates, a translation problem, a matter of deploying metaphors and finding gross generalizations that aren't too gross. Started

From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

When I'm with you I feel faintly anxious, judged, inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too, but that desire I find irritating, and so contradicted in myself. Why should I care? You don't care. And yet you do care. I love you, you said. And she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her.

Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?

Black space, blue world, just like the pictures, but with the startling high resolution of reality. Art stared down at West Africa and a great wave of nausea rolled through every cell of him.

When we traded places, I could only lead for a couple hundred yards before slowing to a snail's pace. Sinking thigh deep made for exhausting work. Terry would take back the lead without comment. Following him, I stepped exactly in his deep snowshoe prints, feeling relief at how much easier things became when the trail was broken.

The poet Charles Reznikoff walked about twenty miles a day through the streets of Manhattan. One Thomas J. Kean, age sixty-five, walked every street, avenue, alley, square, and court on Manhattan Island. It took him four years, during which he traversed 502 miles, comprising 3,022 city blocks. He walked the streets first, then the avenues, lastly Broadway.

He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen.

NOTE: Islamic and Chinese calendars are lunar. Christian and Buddhist calendars are solar.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.

And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem.

We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.

I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?