Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

A major part of sustainability is social justice, here and everywhere. Think of it this way: justice is a technology. It's like a software program that we use to cope with the world and get along with each other, and one of the most effective we have ever invented, because we are all in this together. When you realize that acting with justice and generosity turns out to be the most effective technology for dealing with other people, that's a good thing.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn't work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee.

To her data analysis was the ugly love child of science and Kafka

Nothing was ever normal again. Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.

And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don't know we have, glimpses of that larger world—vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling—this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.

Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it's hard to fix! Ha-ha.

My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit.

It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn't seem possible.

You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.

Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe!

Oceans of clouds in my chest.

At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.

Volatile people, you can't trust them, that's the thing; and they know it. So that even if they feel remorse, it does no good, and they know that too. So they get lonely. And they feel the remorse less and less, maybe. They give up.

Oh God, Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.

A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman.

Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons.

So she fixes things by thinking about them!

Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.

a circle of Göbekli T-stones, which looked very contemporary even though they were based on something over ten thousand years old.