Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

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

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

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

Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites.

“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!”

Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have to consider it less than successful, okay?

Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique.

“Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.”
His listeners nodded unhappily.
“So everything is expanding. But it can’t happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can’t get an output larger than the input.”

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

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

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

Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on.

No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had also been suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression.

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?

“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.