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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9d0d8e7 | Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners--it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4c7febc | The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality. | science word-plays | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| c50f1dd | If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that. | self-reliance | Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
| 6b33853 | When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3fa7172 | 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 | ||
| 7d5efc9 | No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7035d77 | 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 | ||
| fa18146 | Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a951137 | 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 | ||
| df78812 | What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not do anything. It was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A type of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e14ee58 | capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 08fd618 | it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| eb314da | 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 | ||
| 81fe294 | when you are a small minority and you own the majority's wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3c38468 | It's a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 202e183 | It grew in the dark, it's a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3d512d7 | They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1bbc484 | We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2c2f12f | Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spa.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3ba93e6 | that's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 86b18ea | They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6e98bb1 | Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e0b3006 | 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. And so now we're on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won't destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won't go away... | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 69d26df | 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 | ||
| 26934a8 | Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| da3d404 | no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340 | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4e3d819 | When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c2bfe63 | 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. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0780e84 | because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9d8f37b | Looking around the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving--beating very lightly--a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2822807 | Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell." Aram" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2a3c929 | Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fdd3cb1 | Writers be warned: adventure, psychology, and even comprehension are before all else affects. It's impossible to achieve any of the three without at least grammar, whether acceded to or violated, or style of some kind under some control. | Zelazny Roger | ||
| 143504b | 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 | ||
| b0b771d | Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c5b7b55 | So we were shouted at, we were beat on. "What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!" We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: "WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fe903a4 | There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander," we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9dcdb12 | We should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9328682 | 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 | ||
| 31c0d36 | Jevons Paradox, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6576d63 | However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen." Badim" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 48fc652 | the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 573dd71 | Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body. Now | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2a59c03 | Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology? | Kim Stanley Robinson |