Top 160 Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

2. “The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

3. “People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

4. “The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

5. “You can only kill disappointment with a new try.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

6. “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

7. “It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

8. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

9. “Atoms have a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons bound together. Around this nucleus shells of electrons spin, and each shell is either full or trying to get full, to balance with the number of protons-to balance the number of positive and negative charges. An atom is like a human heart, you see.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

10. “To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast – or better.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

11. “Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

12. “History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking – an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

13. “Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

14. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

15. “A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

16. “What we need is equality without conformity.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

17. “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

18. “Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

19. “Life is complex, and entropy is real.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

20. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

21. “So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

22. “That is what capitalism is – a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

23. “And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

24. “I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

25. “You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don’t hold back. Don’t look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

26. “How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

27. “If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

28. “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

29. “Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

30. “Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

31. “So she fixes things by thinking about them!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

32. “The one who tells the stories rules the world.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

33. “We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

34. “The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

35. “They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

36. “She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

37. “A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. – Le.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

38. “You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

39. “That’s libertarians for you – anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

40. “The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

41. “We 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

42. “If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

43. “History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

45. “In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

46. “History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

47. “I know.” She sighed. “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 Robinson

48. “It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

50. “So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your losses and walk. You are forced by the structure of the situation to throw good money after bad, grow obsessed, double down, escalate your commitment, and become a mad gibbering apartment dweller, unable to imagine leaving. You persevere unto death, a monomaniacal New Yorker to the end.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson