Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain

the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it's true—that will happen. But it's going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast.

Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than any real thing. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last

Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars.

In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also from the Daoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God.

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.

People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.

Abstract, conclusion; abstract, conclusion. Female brown capuchin monkeys throw things if they see other monkeys getting more than they got from an equivalent exchange. Aversion to inequity therefore probably very deep-rooted, evolutionarily. Sense of fairness evolved. Thus cooperative groups, long before hominids. Monkey ethics; interesting.

Everyone was equal there. Men, women, children, and people you couldn't say what they were. All the various skin tones, and wherever you came from before, it didn't matter. In this new place you made it all new, and people were just people, meant to be equal, and to treat each other respectfully at all times. It

Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.

To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world.

Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all." "Abraham Lincoln was no Republican." "Hello?" "The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.

doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed.

So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax's plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could.

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain.

But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time

There was scientifically supported evidence to show that if the Earth's available resources were divided up equally among all eight billion humans, everyone would be fine.

Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. "Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold and shabby at six.

It's not so bad to be a prisoner, if you're working on an escape.

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340

Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it's catch-as-catch-can.

principle of mediocrity.