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8b4b5c1
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Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work-- no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the syste..
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institutions
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e6f41aa
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The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fef24f7
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You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0ab07c4
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My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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925111f
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And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"--i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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eb926c8
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The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ebe4e5e
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Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It's crowdsourced, it's democratic, it's capitalism, it's the market.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bcb8921
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ease of representation. It's always more than what you see, bigger than what you know. That said, people in this era did do it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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Remember: ease of representation. It's always more than what you see, bigger than what you know. That said, people in this era did do it. 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 one can parse or understand. Moving on from this brief excursion into political philosophy before the profund..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ccc10ac
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bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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Things are sold for less than it costs to make them. ... lots of business do go bankrupt. The ones that don't haven't actually sold their thing for more than it costs to make. They've just ignored some of their costs. ... they shove some of their production costs off their books.
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economics
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5a81bbe
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Some mistakes you never can make good.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7cb09a1
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But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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dfd76fc
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You can't make love to your fame. Even though some people try.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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187199c
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Popper called that monocausotaxophilia,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0d844c3
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And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4fad3c9
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Crap in the Cloud. A novel of celestial sewage.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bd76788
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I was told that one senior person at NSF finished reading the trilogy and immediately sold his house and moved into a camper in a trailer park. That's taking things too far, probably, but I like the impulse, because we read novels to help create our sense of what the world means, to mentally travel in other people's lives, and to get some laughs. So whether you light out for the territory afterward or not, read on, reader, and may this stor..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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126925e
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It is a form of grace to become nothing but a task" -Hjalmar Nederland from Kim Stanley Robinson's "Icehenge"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5fd1bda
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And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cdaad52
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doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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53d5385
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Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1d0a663
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Wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession. supposed Francis Spufford
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b633808
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History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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That's why you aren't hearing from anyone out there. That's why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can't leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet." "But"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3a7df3c
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It's not as if she needs the torch anymore, the welcome beacon to immigrants having been long since snuffed out. Probably
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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35b933f
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Actually, I'd better look that thing up and find out what it's called. I'm pretty sure it has a name." "Everything has a name!" "Yes, I guess that's right."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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655a7c9
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Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that's not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that's always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it." He"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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92fd463
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People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ee022ee
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She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn't know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, t..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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104a368
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A] healthy respect for tradition[;]...a kind of default survival behavior
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c710ec2
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They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential ..
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potential
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8f7f02b
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He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it-- it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That's politics....
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9bf55a4
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Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than real. We plunge through the years like giants, as the poet said, and not one of us can be understood except as creatures continuously exfoliating. When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us--or else ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ffba94e
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So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax's plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bd2e6d5
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Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: "Where they come from, anyway?" They didn't know. It didn't matter. What do you talk about when you're falling love? It doesn't matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cca2b40
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Nothing was ever normal again. Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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280d256
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Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |