Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.

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

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

“It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power.

No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.

“It’s kind of scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.”
“Always.”

How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?

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.

And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future—his life—what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color.

You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.