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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 299a6a0 | They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don't want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin's biggest messes. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| db93f73 | Aldrin cycle | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f0b4eb2 | In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a f.. | equality greed power wealth | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 8a03e4d | was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6764c08 | I'm told finance doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it's more just advanced programming, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d676abb | I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big." "I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn't do it thinking, Hey, now that I'm president I'll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c5d4f14 | history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 68844b4 | Sheer dumb sentience. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ae63f02 | Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller. | reincarnation | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| d2cb14a | Please Jeff? You're sounding scary." "I'm just saying! Besides, what's scarier than right now?" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3da7e4c | But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?" "It is, it is. Believe me." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6d81795 | Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to be.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 71e82b7 | In times like these," he would say, "everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That's the glory of these times. They have woken us up." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 756030c | But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4fe0db3 | There is no such thing as purity. It's an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 484a0f5 | Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 26d2b0d | From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d463d86 | Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 282ebc2 | Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition--the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4845930 | These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded. They were only the most prominent of many good ideas to be proposed, and please feel free to add your own favorites, as certai.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cc72b20 | Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity. Then, if you go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world." "But the results are impossible!" "Not at all. There are other dimensions fo.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e0a7e97 | policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 425d1d1 | The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescope.. | conciousness exploration mars sax-russell space-exploration | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| b268da0 | It is said that the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, Cassandra, but I hoped it was not so. | hades love | Roger Zelazny | |
| 604e463 | There remained a main melody, or a path through a maze--a maze that was like the delta of the Po. He seemed to look down on it as he sang it. A great number of channels were weaving down a slightly tilted plain. Each channel was a mathematical specialty--some of them shallow and disappearing into the sand, but most making their loop and reconnecting to other flows. A few were the kind of deep channels that ships would use. Upstream they coa.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d8715b8 | A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d7222a4 | Heather the midwife, the herb woman, the loudmouth, the witch, the crone, the horrible hag, the deadly poisoner. A very busy and bossy old woman, small and bent and proud to have three teeth left, two opposed. The spider was her animal, and it was said she turned into one sometimes. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1e470a2 | and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d20c8a8 | 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. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 71f9216 | We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2fcd5bf | Despair could never touch a morning like this. The air was cool, and smelled of sage. It had the clarity that comes to Southern California only after a Santa Ana wind has blown all haze and history out to sea -- air like telescopic glass, so that the snowcapped San Gabriela seemed near enough to touch, though they were forty miles away. The flanks of the blue foothills revealed the etching of every ravine, and beneath the foothills, stretch.. | ever hook | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| b193082 | There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have capture your fancy, and perhaps they can be solved, but they are the easy ones. | science science-fiction | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 6ecb9f8 | Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented colapse. They were getting depressed. | pessimism science science-fiction society | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 1fc9db2 | What can I say, friends?" he cried. "This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e24a95d | Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What is now lacking? | philosophy | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 5a1d174 | Marriage," Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth--an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one's life in epochs, each a stage in one's history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were ou.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 127a91d | No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn't true. Each part of the triune brain has its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What's good is good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape--some place for people to live in for ages to come--then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough. But then you wanted to share it. Just so there .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a6b51f4 | We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 20a2971 | Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of the Earth. Not a genius. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4d0f088 | Everyone was equal there. Men, women, children, and people you couldn't say what they were. All the various skin tones, and wherever you came from before, it didn't matter. In this new place you made it all new, and people were just people, meant to be equal, and to treat each other respectfully at all times. It | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 10e7783 | The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 80adb0f | And yet here they were. He looked at Aurora's assistants, hovering over the bank of machines against the wall. He hoped the treatment would work, that it would not kill or derange him. They slipped their preparation into his blood using a hollow needle that they inserted painlessly into his skin--an ugly little experience. He held his breath as they did this, and when he finally exhaled and inhaled, the world ballooned. He saw immediately t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 77e0163 | If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a31bfe0 | I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation. | Kim Stanley Robinson |