Kim Stanley Robinson

"Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it."

"To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses."

"Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable."

"It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds."

"Dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force."

"Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm."

"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."

"Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them."

"She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Event would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now."

"Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present."

"Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it."

"She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same."

"Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if she only exerted herself hard enough, the world would change. Now she knew better."

"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 US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off."

"I think the US is in a terrible state of denial … Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Götterdämmerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong."

"Science is--or should be--the greenest force of all."

"Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity."

"“And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics."

"Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics."

"Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen."

"“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.” “The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said."

"“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated. ”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”"

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

"“But that may be Freudianism.” “In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.” She laughed. “Exactly.”"

"The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y."

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

"“Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.” Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”"

"Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots. These seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots, but even the best were mindless idiots."

"Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists."

"“Part of a team,” Ann said dully. “Well, you are.” “I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”"

"“You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”"

"“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”"

"“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”"

"So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole."

"Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate."

"You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try."

"That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size."

"Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred."

"And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything."

"Well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided."

"Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."

"...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust."

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

"Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government."

"The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots."

"There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook."

"Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not."