|
dea2394
|
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.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
4960fcc
|
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
|
|
intelligence
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
793ab75
|
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
6c48139
|
This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
1533ca9
|
And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore t..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
5fce690
|
The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in t..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
d7b3f7e
|
He is the same soul. You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is ..
|
|
love
intellect
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
50bc12c
|
Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. 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. Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
eb8767f
|
Freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
8382125
|
Life is complex, and entropy is real.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
b13133b
|
So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive noti..
|
|
religion
reflections
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
394558b
|
Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
152b21f
|
Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
2e7c06b
|
The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn't wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn't want to know. For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didn't want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe's logic was stronger..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
a6892ef
|
So it's democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there's empty land here, there's scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we're going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens thro..
|
|
social-change
revolution
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
c311feb
|
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 down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.
|
|
winter
spring
mystery
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
70d6f14
|
You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don't hold back. Don't look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You're always only in the day you're in.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
4d10a3c
|
Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
50b0679
|
Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
afc6704
|
We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble,..
|
|
meaning-of-life
purpose
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
e6cb3ce
|
It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.
|
|
pollitics
oratory
rhetoric
promises
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
b63710d
|
we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
168ddb5
|
It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
0cff640
|
Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
69c8c31
|
Maybe that's why we've never heard a peep from anywhere. It's not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That's the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It's something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That's its home. So, you know, Fermi's paradox has its answer, which is..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
a65a7e4
|
You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
9ec6283
|
Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
0000d80
|
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 |
|
6ecee0f
|
It was a whiny culture, we were finding.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
48b6266
|
The past is always gone," Wahram said. "Whether the place is still there or not."
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
7147a84
|
We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
8a8be3c
|
good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
02c2df8
|
Consciousness is the hard problem.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
d04282e
|
They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
|
|
science
philosophy
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
2501ace
|
Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totali..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
8fb642f
|
After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which ..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
637375f
|
Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
f369777
|
People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's life.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
65fcf5e
|
Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
91b015a
|
Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
1ad53c7
|
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).
|
|
choice
reality
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
1365d6b
|
One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
30a3e0e
|
A major part of sustainability is social justice, here and everywhere. Think of it this way: justice is a technology. It's like a software program that we use to cope with the world and get along with each other, and one of the most effective we have ever invented, because we are all in this together. When you realize that acting with justice and generosity turns out to be the most effective technology for dealing with other people, that's ..
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
2abe92c
|
Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it's hard to fix! Ha-ha.
|
|
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |