Kim Stanley Robinson: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 14, “Phoenix Lake” (pp. 746-747)

People

“We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 13, “Experimental Procedures” (p. 692)

Understanding

“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”

Kim Stanley Robinson

they weren’t always
Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 13, “Experimental Procedures” (p. 657)

Beauty , Truth , Reality , Science

“No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 13, “Experimental Procedures” (p. 644)

Memory

“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

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 621)

History

“Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 603)

Fear , Death

“Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 598)

Time , Past

“Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 566)

Chance , Love

“The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 563)

History , Stupidity

“Dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 11, “Viriditas” (p. 483)

Time , Hope , Sense

“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 10, “Werteswandel” (p. 462)

Fear

“Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 9, “Natural History” (p. 433)

Happiness

“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.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 8, “The Green and the White” (p. 393)

People , World , Courage , Sense

“A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 8, “The Green and the White” (p. 381)

Way , Change

“Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 8, “The Green and the White” (p. 363)

“Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 5, “Home At Last” (p. 239)

Business

“Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 4, “Green Earth” (p. 166)

Drawing

“You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 3, “A New Constitution” (p. 156)

Law

“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.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 3, “A New Constitution” (p. 156)

Communication

“People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 3, “A New Constitution” (pp. 128-129)

People , Help