Kim Stanley Robinson quotes

It is always the teacher who must learn the most ... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange. (Kim Stanley Robinson)
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
What we need is equality without conformity. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics. View quote
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 Götterdämmerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, "expressed in curves. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation. (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. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Rock is much more malleable than ideas. View quote
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 . View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
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. View quote
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. View quote
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 or an equation. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
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. View quote
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. (Kim Stanley Robinson)
A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
It's amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson
Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it. View quote
Kim Stanley Robinson