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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ae8049a | Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 91bca35 | To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cac02cf | Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ae0f7f8 | For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What's it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it's not that many. And then we have a new world to live on." "If" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6ede5fc | I mean it's obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it's alive it's going to be poisonous, if it's dead you're going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you've got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what's the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 252e90b | Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as a.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 72a4cf9 | When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us--or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves--no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 470132c | Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ae20d03 | But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. 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. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was no.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2b08a50 | He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0678e0f | Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 25f1db2 | I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them. | Alfred Hitchcock | ||
| f1f14a1 | 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. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened. And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, n.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6ae8372 | He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don't matter. Don't you see? They just don't matter. Fools will always be with us. You have to leave them to it, and find your own way. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ebf9bf2 | So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 40f5e0b | Thus it went as she made her way around the biomes of Ring B. Always she found that her mother the great engineer had made some crucial intervention, finding solutions to problems that had stymied the locals. Devi had the knack of sidestepping dilemmas, Badim said when Freya mentioned this, by moving back several logical steps, and coming at the situation from some new way not yet noticed. "It's sometimes called avoiding acquiescence," Badi.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4acaf1d | Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 79ef672 | The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world...' She shook her head. 'Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, that the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Pial.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f548242 | He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a78cd24 | When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakista.. | religion | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 308ee12 | People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d5546b2 | To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4bd5574 | Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal--Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. "Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold and shabby at six." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4864f3a | 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 | ||
| a605b59 | 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 | ||
| 8273c3c | But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2c6000b | The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 713f69e | The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema. | Alfred Hitchcock | ||
| 54971e0 | Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| dbc1b0f | Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting. | life | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 0cbb002 | Anyway that's a large part of what economics is--peo-ple 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 | ||
| d17f56e | Could we do both? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cb3b65e | Who programmed this thing? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6b2258a | Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| defd5ec | So who else did you convince?" "Well, I got Joe to potty train himself, and then I convinced Anna to leave the kids at home and go with me on a vacation to Jamaica." | boldness dreams funny life | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 2339805 | Round and round and round we go, And where we stop, nobody knows. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8153f44 | Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that f.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 03e541a | 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 | ||
| b232532 | Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cogni.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f4fa604 | Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 843d1e8 | When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6c43a23 | It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don't you? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2b56783 | It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6725be6 | Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar. | Kim Stanley Robinson |