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

After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up.

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

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.