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Kim Stanley Robinson
147 quotes
“If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Future tense" in The Guardian (14 September 2005)
“I think the US is in a terrible state of denial … Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Götterdämmerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Future tense" in The Guardian (14 September 2005)
“Science is--or should be--the greenest force of all.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Heroes of the Environment 2008" in Time (24 September 2008)
“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 (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.” “The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated. ”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But that may be Freudianism.” “In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.” She laughed. “Exactly.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.” Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of a team,” Ann said dully. “Well, you are.” “I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them—if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you told her that?” “You bet I have, but Hiroko only listens to me when I say things she wants to hear.” He cackled. “Same as with everyone, right?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Master and slave wear the yoke together. Anarchy is the only true freedom.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.” His listeners nodded unhappily. “So everything is expanding. But it can’t happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can’t get an output larger than the input.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the random flux of universal contingency, nothing mattered; and yet, and yet...”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But nothing lasts, not even stone, not even despair.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bah. Irrelevant. Physical reality is clearly not a factor in these calculations.” “Well put.” Sax shook his head, frustrated. “Religion again. Or ideology. What was it Frank used to say? An imaginary relationship to a real situation?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source