Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

The UN was his idea, not hers," Phil objected. "She worked for it after it was established, but he had the idea from even before the war. World peace, the rule of law, and the end of all the empires. It was amazing how hard he tweaked Churchill and de Gaulle on that. He wouldn't lift a finger to help them keep their old empires after the war.

She had the charisma of the sensible.

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, and thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted; someone who would like you more than you do; someone who likes you despite yourself; someone more generous to you than you are.

Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.

The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.

The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky.

It is a form of grace to become nothing but a task -Hjalmar Nederland from Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge

Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.

The good that [Galileo] fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.

The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened. And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death

Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror.

And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.

the word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water.

But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing.

Of course I am old now, but there is no changing that, except by death. At least I have this day, and these days.

because economics was above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement.

For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting

And besides we were like wolves! We turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans— we were something like orangutans before, solitaries who didn't know how to work together, it was the wolves who taught us that, who taught us the idea of friendship and cooperation

One-eight-billionth wasn't a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn't entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

The evening light would concentrate itself into the band of sky over the black jagged peaks of the Hellespontus, brilliant pinks and silvers and violets shading up into dark indigos and bruised blacks, and their voices would soften in that last part of the twilight Michel called entre chien et loup.

At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs.

A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there's trouble." "Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.