Top 100 Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

#1. You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #3618
#2. The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #4271
#3. They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #16413
#4. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #18328
#5. We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #23802
#6. Sometimes I get so scared."
"Fear is a form of alertness.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #34650
#7. It is a long time ago. So many lives ago
I get them all confused, don't you?

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #53565
#8. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #57870
#9. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #63892
#10. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #160895
#11. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #181172
#12. Who programmed this thing?

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #196814
#13. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #197092
#14. History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #197798
#15. Teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #205404
#16. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #207333
#17. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #219183
#18. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #259025
#19. Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #265462
#20. You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #270581
#21. Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #295525
#22. Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #333405
#23. Slow is not the same as deficient. It's just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #352079
#24. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #375104
#25. It seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #427501
#26. the crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you're doing more than you would be if you were in some sleepy village or Denver or really anywhere else. New

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #447353
#27. 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.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #453612
#28. Existence is the experiment itself.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #464866
#29. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #486426
#30. 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.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #493593
#31. Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling.
The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #495649
#32. Freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #513590
#33. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #523835
#34. Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #532174
#35. 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.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #548848
#36. One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #559990
#37. Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her - she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had loved her.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #584339
#38. That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #617779
#39. It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #622972
#40. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #626382
#41. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #630856
#42. Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #644776
#43. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #657227
#44. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #728888
#45. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #770824
#46. A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #778350
#47. Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #789622
#48. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #796505
#49. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #816216
#50. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #836914
#51. So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #855800
#52. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #881189
#53. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #881506
#54. Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell. Aram

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #892484
#55. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #911350
#56. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #942417
#57. Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #943221
#58. But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?" "It is, it is. Believe me.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1002817
#59. But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra - an orchestrion, an orchestrina - whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo -

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1005925
#60. The gooseneck," Badim adds, with a quick smile at Freya. "It connects the boom to the mast, but it isn't very robust.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1017372
#61. Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it's hard to fix! Ha-ha.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1020968
#62. Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
...
Fate is the path of least action.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1042176
#63. It is always the teacher who must learn the most ... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1098981
#64. Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1103742
#65. Consciousness is the hard problem.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1122682
#66. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1137901
#67. As if you are already dead.'" "What's that?" "A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1156206
#68. It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1167071
#69. The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1169937
#70. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1176890
#71. capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1189548
#72. Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes and trying any old thing.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1195079
#73. She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1230397
#74. One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1264894
#75. You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1272710
#76. - I can paint that fucking cave.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1273840
#77. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1338068
#78. In an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1378069
#79. You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1382927
#80. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1386850
#81. Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1418171
#82. A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1420621
#83. Sheer dumb sentience. Here

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1466755
#84. Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1485927
#85. It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1494954
#86. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1543191
#87. We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.
(Attributed to Reinhold Messner?)

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1543442
#88. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1566060
#89. A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1590804
#90. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1623410
#91. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1637242
#92. no one else can live your life for you.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1675569
#93. 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 Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1745907
#94. It's the love of right lures men to wrong.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1757144
#95. Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe!

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1799268
#96. Round and round and round we go, And where we stop, nobody knows.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1804951
#97. Knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1841187
#98. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages,

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Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1856254
#99. What has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history.

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Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1864521
#100. And Adirondack is one of the world's biggest investment firms. So

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes #1873383

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