269 Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons.

Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians.

Over the years we saw what worked and refined our methods. Violence didn’t work. Numbers did. That’s the secret, in case you are looking for the secret to resisting an imperial power, which was what we were doing through those years. Non-violent resistance of the total population, or as much of it as you can get. That’s what works.

Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see?

That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude.

Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater’s jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make Islam good.

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.