Quotes by 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.”

“Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no ...”

“All the great moments of history have taken place inside peoples heads.”

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

“It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, dont you?”

“If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect ou...”

“You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.”

“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...”

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

“The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, i...”

“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 radiatio...”

“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 descr...”

“The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.”

“The people are suffering. Relieving peoples poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.”

“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 war...”

“You can only kill disappointment with a new try.”

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

“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...”

“Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Budd...”

“In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital diff...”