Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

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.

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring - that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

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!

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

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.

...knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.

You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

no one else can live your life for you.

All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time -

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.