Kim Stanley Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

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

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

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.

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe.

And each of us with every breath gives something back

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

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

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—

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.

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.

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

Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder