Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen.

It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! It's staying in love that's the hard part.

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren't the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured.

He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control.

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not.

We are the primitives of an unknown civilization

They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.

He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.

Also it isn't clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war.

Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.

no one else can live your life for you.

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.

Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer's solution, which is to hit things with a hammer.

Every astronomer loves the stars.

It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.

But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.

Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.

Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting.