Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads.

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.

if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage?

Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today.

Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you.

Freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.

It seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear.

If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it's a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now's the time. Now's the time, people!

But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.

Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.

Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.

You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don't hold back. Don't look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You're always only in the day you're in.

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.