Kim Stanley Robinson

“Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.”

“But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.”

“Memory is a haunting.”

“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.”

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

“It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.”

“Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

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

“Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back”

“We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.”

“The command to be free is a double bind”

“You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.”

“And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.”

“Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.”

“It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”

“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—”

“Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since”

“In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental.”

“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”

“It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person”

“Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape”

“We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.”

“If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling”

“Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies”

“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.”

“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

“It's the love of right lures men to wrong.”

“...teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.”

“Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.”

“It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.”

“Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.”

“...no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.”

“Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.”

“None of us know our real names.”

“He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.”

“Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.”

“And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you're in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.”

“We all have 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 else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.”

“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

“But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.”

“It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century’s war dead.”

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”

“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.”