Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

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

They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

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.

But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.

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.

Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.

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.

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around.

He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

“We could have a contest. Who does Jackie listen to least?”
Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”

Every generation is its own secret society.

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.