Kim Stanley Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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.

Kim Stanley
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.

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

Kim Stanley
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.

Kim Stanley
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).

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

Kim Stanley
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.

Kim Stanley
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.

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

Kim Stanley
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—

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

Kim Stanley
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.

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

Kim Stanley
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.

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

Kim Stanley
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?

Kim Stanley
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.

Kim Stanley