Kim Stanley Robinson > Quotes

“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, Icehenge

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“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, The Years of Rice and Salt

“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, Blue Mars

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

“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, Galileo's Dream

“Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“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.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“What we need is equality without conformity.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“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.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“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, Blue Mars

“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, Red Mars

“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, Green Mars

“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, Red Mars

“Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“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, Antarctica

“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, Red Mars

“To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“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.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“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.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“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, 2312

“Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice-as if they were in a space station-”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312