Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas o… - 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.

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.

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.