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. - Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”