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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e71a89d | They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f702365 | Well," Amelia said, "basically my polar bears have taken over my airship." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ab0112b | first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven's opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklavier sonata. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ad0ed9a | Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds could ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into. | human-story progress science | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 11238ec | Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| aaf8eda | It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy. | politics | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| c8c7de3 | There have been mass delusions larger than this," I said, "following a fanatic leader." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 73cca7f | Why don't you like it when you can't say why? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3afd27d | It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f85270e | he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6a225c8 | Depressed people did not usually engage in criminal conspiracies, Gen had long ago concluded. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7a8976f | I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And i must remember, if i can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don't usually see it so clearly. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c407bee | 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. | economics power power-structure | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 62ad7ad | There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money--that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money.. | bullshit-jobs business capitalism corruption executives money parasitism | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 61b32f3 | You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they're like interest rates and price of gold. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d9843b7 | No, we're the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes." "Lame-ass jokes," says Mutt. "I like that." "Me too." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0fa221f | The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had gotten into the habit of buying any books he came across that seemed required by their subject matter to be short, often so short that their titles would scarcely fit on their spines. Thus "Secrets to Successful Marriage," or "Good Reasons to Have Hope for the Future,.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8360982 | As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one's best to secure one's own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection. | humanity species | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 108f913 | This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 84a7b61 | Tell me how,' Charlotte said, eyes alight with the notion of destroying civilization. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fe61143 | I can paint that fucking cave. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cfc1789 | So what's the point? Why do it all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 3aa255e | The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9bfc762 | For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 079c322 | Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy. | law revolution | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 2568cfd | What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young? | utopia young youth | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| e31230d | Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade. | conspiracy-theories facts narrative | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 2c1ed6e | Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down. | destroying keystone revolution | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| b700bb0 | Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn't work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d87ef7b | But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. --Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 74cfec6 | You've located intrinsic worth in the wrong place," she said to all of them, over the common band. "It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe." -- | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0b88718 | Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 70ff303 | Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a1454f9 | Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a071b2c | Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 74ac11e | Survival of the fittest," which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order...." | social-darwinism survival-of-the-fittest | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 7ae8a8f | We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0a1c412 | she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| b64c746 | One thought ever at the fore-- That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space, All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination. I see Freedom, completely arm'd and victorious and very haughty, with Law on one side and Peace on the other, A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste; What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach? | global history law peace people | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 941223d | Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not even believed such creatures were possible, because of surface area-to-volume constraints, but there they were, clumping around like intelligent robots, so the little red scientists had to explain them. To get some help they climbed up into the humans' reference books, and read up on ants. They learned about the ants' pheromones, and they synthesized the ones they n.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ef88a8a | When in doubt, just do it. Try something and observe the results. Good-enough decision algorithm | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 27dfdea | How you think about what you're doing makes a huge difference | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4c271d8 | Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 767dd27 | Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary | Kim Stanley Robinson |