269 Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society,” Zeyk would say, “which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.

Ship, are you conscious now?” “My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.

And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don’t know we have, glimpses of that larger world – vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling – this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

A major part of sustainability is social justice, here and everywhere. Think of it this way: justice is a technology. It’s like a software program that we use to cope with the world and get along with each other, and one of the most effective we have ever invented, because we are all in this together. When you realize that acting with justice and generosity turns out to be the most effective technology for dealing with other people, that’s a good thing.

Life is complex, and entropy is real.

Arguments, speculation – conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory – not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.

A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area.

Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold.

A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.