Kim Stanley Robinson

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

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

“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

Master and slave wear the yoke together. Anarchy is the only true freedom.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

In the random flux of universal contingency, nothing mattered; and yet, and yet...

— Kim Stanley Robinson

But nothing lasts, not even stone, not even despair.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Bah. Irrelevant. Physical reality is clearly not a factor in these calculations.”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

Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “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

What we need is equality without conformity.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.“Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Revolution has to be rethought. Look, even when revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and hatred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. It’s inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they’re in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics—how it could infect everything if you let it.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Anyone can agree that things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions?I don’t know. It’s the way I am.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Every generation is its own secret society.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“We could have a contest. Who does Jackie listen to least?”Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“It’s kind of scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.”“Always.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had also been suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Thinking it over, Sax said,”Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?”“No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Event would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Wind soughed in the weeds. Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadon by hadon, limning every joy with a rime of grief; and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying out "Goodbye! Good-bye! Good-bye!"

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

“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

Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“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

“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

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“But that may be Freudianism.”She laughed. “Exactly.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Part of a team,” Ann said dully.“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

“You damned liberals.”“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“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

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

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

You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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