Best 94 quotes of Kim Stanley Robinson on MyQuotes

Kim Stanley Robinson

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    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

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Atoms have a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons bound together. Around this nucleus shells of electrons spin, and each shell is either full or trying to get full, to balance with the number of protons-to balance the number of positive and negative charges. An atom is like a human heart, you see.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

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    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.

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    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 .

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

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    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 Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    On the river path in Boston beauty was most expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than demographics would ordinarily suggest. Maybe that was why young men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    There's Jevon's paradox that the better we get at efficiently using energy the more energy we use; so that and that machine technology improvements per se do not necessarily reduce our impacts because we immediately double down on how much we use.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

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    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

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    We ought to be keeping in mind that the technology is not just hardware and machinery, it is also software. So you can think of languages of the technology and writing of the technology and the social justice of the technology in what social justice does is reduce impacts on the Earth because the most impact is from the poorest and richest people.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference?

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. 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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one’s best to secure one’s own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Because life is robust, Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it, So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons, O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand, Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks, Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Despair could never touch a morning like this. The air was cool, and smelled of sage. It had the clarity that comes to Southern California only after a Santa Ana wind has blown all haze and history out to sea — air like telescopic glass, so that the snowcapped San Gabriela seemed near enough to touch, though they were forty miles away. The flanks of the blue foothills revealed the etching of every ravine, and beneath the foothills, stretching to the sea, the broad coastal plain seemed nothing but treetops: groves of orange, avocado, lemon, olive; windbreaks of eucalyptus and palm; ornamentals of a thousand different varieties, both natural and genetically engineered. It was as if the whole plain were a garden run riot, with the dawn sun flushing the landscape every shade of green.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.

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    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.

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    Kim Stanley Robinson

    For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever.