Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It

The reporter said, Why do you rob banks? And Sutton replied, Because that's where the money is.

The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.

You know a constitution is kind of like a blueprint," Charlotte said thoughtfully. "Getting a real working government out of it is the true act of construction.

Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said.

And now India had paid the price. More people had died in this heat wave than in the entirety of the First World War, and all in a single week and in a single region of the world. The stain of such a crime would never go away, it would remain forever.

A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference?

Like what? Mary asked. Issued for what? For not burning carbon. Started writing on the whiteboard, feeling she was oriented enough to be ready for some figures. Not equations, which might just as well be Sanskrit to her, only some numbers.

him. That in itself was deeply worrying. It was Jeff, one of our mountaineers, who followed a snowmobile track to an unobtrusive hole. He then came back and got Lance, the team's other mountaineer, looking

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the U.S., realize they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value.

The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the U.S., realize they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value.

It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.

That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.