01c. 1976 ADThey lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
02c. 1976 ADThe word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
03c. 1976 ADThe 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.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
04c. 1976 ADYou just don't have faith!" Frank repeated."Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
05c. 1976 ADWe 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.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
06c. 1976 ADYou have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
07c. 1976 ADEconomics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
08c. 1976 ADScience was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
09c. 1976 ADHe pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
10c. 1976 ADThe rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
11c. 1976 ADAnd in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
12c. 1976 ADThey were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
13c. 1976 ADHe was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics....Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
14c. 1976 ADThe triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
15c. 1976 ADEfficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
16c. 1976 ADAll 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.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
17c. 1976 ADNothing was ever normal again.Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
18c. 1976 ADThe 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 telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxidesKim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
19c. 1976 ADIndividuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
20c. 1976 ADAll the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
21c. 1976 ADHumans 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.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
22c. 1976 ADBecause life is robust,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,So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
23c. 1976 ADI grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
24c. 1976 ADThe 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—Kim Stanley Robinson / quote ↗
