Kim Stanley Quotes

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

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.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

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.

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

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

None of us know our real names.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

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

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

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

What we need is equality without conformity.

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.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

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.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

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 is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

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

All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.

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

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

The command to be free is a double bind

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.

It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic .

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 vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

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

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

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

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.