Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

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.

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.

But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.

People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!

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.

Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain.

If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.

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

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.

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.

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.”