Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

Kim Stanley Robinson
Economics 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
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.

Kim Stanley Robinson
You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

Kim Stanley Robinson
We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

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

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

Kim Stanley Robinson
There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region.

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

Kim Stanley Robinson