Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes
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Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region.
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Rock is much more malleable than ideas.
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Science is-or should be-the greenest force of all.
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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.
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The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.
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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.
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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.
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It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.
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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.
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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.
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You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.
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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.
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A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
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One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.
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Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
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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.
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Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.
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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.