Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.

And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn's stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.

it's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home.

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?

And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).

We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.

Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils

as if you are already dead.'" "What's that?" "A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time.

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

Self-reliance my ass. We're fucking monkeys. It's always about teamwork.

The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital

Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened.

You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love.

Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

we will keep going, we will keep going, because there is no such thing as fate. Because we never really come to the end.

So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

The past is always gone," Wahram said. "Whether the place is still there or not.

Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world's population have decided to give up on the pretense that "progress" or "development" or "prosperity" can be achieved for all eight billion of the world's people.

knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.