Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem.

Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty.

People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.

we are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.

Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar.

But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. —Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia

This method is the only way that will work. But it didn't work! It cut out on us! Yes, but this was just the start. If at first you don't succeed— You'll never get funded again.

The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One

Group dynamics were complex at best, even (he grimaced) unexplainable.

But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always.

They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don't want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin's biggest messes.

It's just I finally get what revolution means. It's maximum volatility with no hedging. And it's insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you're going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It's totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal.

Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides

You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they're like interest rates and price of gold.

Always she had been prone to the rash act. She put it down to something Irish. It seemed to her that Irish women doing rash things was precisely how her people had managed to perpetuate themselves.

People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they're first learning it, and then when they've known it forever.

Götterdämmerung capitalism

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn't they?

If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone's work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable

Energy is the least of it. Since one percent of all electricity created is burned to make bitcoins, seven percent for saving sea level could be seen as a deal. But the physical problems are the stoppers.

Even the night sky frightens the narcissist, as presenting impossible-to-deny evidence of a world exterior to the self. Narcissists therefore tend to stay indoors, live in ideas, and demand compliance and assent from everyone they come in contact with, who are all regarded as servants, or ghosts. And as death approaches, they do their best to destroy as much of the world as they can.

monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity's most common cognitive errors.