Kim Stanley Robinson: Quotes about time

“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”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Antarctica

Source: Antarctica

World , Idea , Time

“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 book Galileo's Dream

As quoted in John Clute, "Scores" http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20100118/clute-c.shtml, in Strange Horizons (18 January 2010)
Galileo's Dream (2009)

God , World , Law , Beauty

“The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Galileo's Dream

Source: Galileo's Dream (2009), Ch. 15, p. 354

Color , Time

“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

“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

“The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Green Mars

Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 6, “Tariqat” (p. 315)

Time , People , Fight

“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

Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 6, “Guns Under the Table” (p. 418)

Time , Law

“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

Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 4, “Homesick” (p. 205)

Change , Time , Life , Parting