Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.

No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

“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.

It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself.

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.

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

“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.
“Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

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

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

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.

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.

One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model.

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.