Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those "objective functions." Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.

if one's physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that's the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Knowledge is important, but much more important is the use toward which it is put. This depends on the heart and mind of the one who uses it.

we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God's sake!

Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You

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. They would all be at adequacy, and the scientific evidence very robustly supported the contention that people living at adequacy, and confident they would stay there (a crucial point), were healthier and thus happier than rich people. So the upshot of that equal division would be an improvement

true-cost true-benefit analysis, which is to say that all costs and benefits are included, including the so-called exterior costs, while the unpriceable aspects of the situation are also acknowledged and included.

He says, "We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.

One thought ever at the fore-- That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space, All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination. I see Freedom, completely arm'd and victorious and very haughty, with Law on one side and Peace on the other, A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste; What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?

For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What's it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it's not that many. And then we have a new world to live on." "If

Fewer people, more wild animals. That feels like coming back from a time of illness. Like healing, like getting healthy. Population dynamics in play, as always. Maybe that makes us all living together in this biosphere some kind of supra-organism, who can say.

Existence is the experiment itself.

We should do this more often," Charlotte lied. "For sure," Larry lied back.

History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously its not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.

They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.

Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise.

This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers, Vlad said. Robber barons are not really very efficient.

When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human.

All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn't this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

If we avoid a mass extinction event in the next 20 years, that's a utopian future.

It's like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.

have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market. High-frequency trading has been put forth as an example of computers out-achieving the market proper, but instead of improving the system it's just been used to take rents on every exchange. This

Robustness and resilience are in general inefficient; but they are robust, they are resilient. And we need that by design.

policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so