Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

But then they weren't materialists at all!" He swore with disgust. "No wonder Marxism is dead." "Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists." "Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians." "Marxists are Hegelian, sir." "Shut up," Frank snarled, and broke the connection.

Wherever there's a commons there's enclosure. And enclosure always wins.

Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One's thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective.

Whether life means anything or not, joy is real.

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

It's not easy to stay unafraid.

tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can't imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much

These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.

Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things.

So if you combined this thing with carbon taxes, you would get taxed if you burn carbon, but paid if you sequester carbon.

because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe

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.

No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that's what we have to try for. That's what our ministry is about. We're trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. No matter what happened before, that's what we can do now.

Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.

that will happen. But it's going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.

Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years.

we can't imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don't charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they'll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That's the tragedy of the time horizon

We must say, I have no past. I am beginning here and now

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration.

So much for Phyllis's bridge," Nadia said. "So much for Phyllis," said Sax.

So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring — that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She

call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It's as simple as that.