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Kim Stanley Robinson
147 quotes
“Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if she only exerted herself hard enough, the world would change. Now she knew better.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following—that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth century existed to prove.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet had been right (they weren’t always).”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this case the problem was simply death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life and of time, this was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve. Postponements, yes; solutions, no. “Reality itself is mortal,” he said.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future—his life—what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have to consider it less than successful, okay?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they eventually became. Whou would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What kind of story am I going to give them next? Because that's what we are to other people, boy, we are their gossip. That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip. And so I could be the story of the man who rode high and fell hard, and had his spirit broken and crawled off into a hole like a dog, to die as soon as he could manage it. Or I could be the story of a man who rode high and fell hard, and then got up defiant, and walked away in a new direction.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 one can become idealistic.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes. God makes the world using mathematics, and he has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand! It's prayer. It's more than prayer, it's a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension—an epiphany—it's seeing God, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that! Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper in God's manner of thinking about these things?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in John Clute, "Scores", in Strange Horizons (18 January 2010)
“Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Locus, (September 1997)
“Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots. These seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots, but even the best were mindless idiots.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. So, okay, there was no such thing as cultural polyploidy. There was just a determinate historical situation, the consequence of all that had come before—the decisions made, the results spreading out over the planet in complete disarray, evolving, or one should say developing, without a plan. Planless. In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make that similarity nothing more than analogy again. No, better to concentrate on homologies, those structural similarities that indicated actual physical relationships, that really explained something. This of course took one back into science.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a real science; it had discovered there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution—development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific principles as well, confirmed by the various subdisciplines. What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, “But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?” “Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.” “Ah.” Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated—the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel, of course, and the Palestinians too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouins from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in his undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous parthenon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source