Kim Stanley Quotes

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

The distinguishing mark of true adventures, is that it is often no fun at all while they are actually happening.

We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.

Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected 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. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.

First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

None of us know our real names.

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

We’ll all say that. 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.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

The command to be free is a double bind

Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

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.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder

It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.

Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.

The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.