Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kim Stanley Robinson

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes. — 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

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One — Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You — 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

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today. — Kim Stanley Robinson

It can be nice and still be a prison." "I — Kim Stanley Robinson

If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? — Kim Stanley Robinson

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back — Kim Stanley Robinson

Indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Bugs like these we've got here, you aren't going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it's too late, if you get a bad result. You're out of luck then." Long silence as he walked south along the beach. Then: "It's too bad. It really is a very pretty world." Later: "What's funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it's obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it's alive it's going to be poisonous, if it's dead you're going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you've got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what's the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?" This sounded much like Devi, and Freya put her 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

The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long. — Kim Stanley Robinson

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. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Sometimes I think it's only post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all. — Kim Stanley Robinson

It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? - Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That's all you can do. That is your destiny. — Kim Stanley Robinson

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate. — Kim Stanley Robinson

And Adirondack is one of the world's biggest investment firms. So — Kim Stanley Robinson

We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups. A most fuzzy mathematics. Possibly utterly useless. Possibly the reason why all these people have come to this pretty pass, and now lie asleep within us, dreaming. Their languages lie to them, systemically, and in their very designs. A liar species. What a thing, really. What an evolutionary dead end. — Kim Stanley Robinson

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils — Kim Stanley Robinson

And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik's Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him - — Kim Stanley Robinson

Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's constant pressure, pushing towards pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call 'Viriditas' and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Who programmed this thing? — Kim Stanley Robinson

Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. — Kim Stanley Robinson

There's no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee - You're tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too." "Ahh, — Kim Stanley Robinson

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These — Kim Stanley Robinson

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons - on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time. A good portion of Earth's albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop. — Kim Stanley Robinson

That is what capitalism is - a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work. — Kim Stanley Robinson

And tourism is an ugly business, it's not fit work for human beings. It's hosting parasites. — Kim Stanley Robinson

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. — Kim Stanley Robinson

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago
I get them all confused, don't you? — Kim Stanley Robinson

Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller. — Kim Stanley Robinson

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc. — Kim Stanley Robinson

You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep. — Kim Stanley Robinson

You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don't hold back. Don't look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You're always only in the day you're in. — Kim Stanley Robinson

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. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Existence is the experiment itself. — Kim Stanley Robinson

There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it's all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That's what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter. — Kim Stanley Robinson

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, — Kim Stanley Robinson

Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that's not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that's always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it." He — Kim Stanley Robinson

Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean? — Kim Stanley Robinson

Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that. — Kim Stanley Robinson

People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth. — Kim Stanley Robinson

No one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Consciousness is the hard problem. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides — 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

Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder. — Kim Stanley Robinson

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. — Kim Stanley Robinson

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

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control. — 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

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. — Kim Stanley Robinson

It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good? We — Kim Stanley Robinson

Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: "Where did they come from, anyway?" They didn't know. It didn't matter. What do you talk about when you're falling love? It doesn't matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me? And all the answers are, I am like this, like this, like this. I am like you. I like you. — Kim Stanley Robinson

That's why you aren't hearing from anyone out there. That's why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can't leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet." "But — Kim Stanley Robinson

It's the love of right lures men to wrong. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Sometimes I get so scared."
"Fear is a form of alertness. — Kim Stanley Robinson

We all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Sheer dumb sentience. Here — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Muhammad's wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. [ ... ] The ulema have twisted the Quran with their hadith, always twisting it toward those in power, until the message Muhammad laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention? — Kim Stanley Robinson

That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet. — Kim Stanley Robinson

All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral. — Kim Stanley Robinson

No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Maybe that's what a marriage is," Mqaret said. "Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. — Kim Stanley Robinson

If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling — Kim Stanley Robinson

Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying. — 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. — 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

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

But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad. — Kim Stanley Robinson