Top 160 Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

54. “And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there’s no way back, no way to go but onward.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

55. “My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

56. “The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

57. “Slow is not the same as deficient. It’s just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

58. “Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

59. “If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

61. “They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

62. “It was a whiny culture, we were finding.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

63. “If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

64. “The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

65. “So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

66. “What’s the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

67. “Best to keep running. Run in the same way one would run on the hunt, just as hard and steady, just as long. Indeed given what was at stake it made sense to go much longer than when on the hunt. Run right through his second wind, run until the rare and elusive third wind filled him, then run some more.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

68. “Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

69. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

70. “Oh God,” Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “It’s hard to remember something that long ago. It’s almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

71. “A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

72. “Bad things don’t just grow on one path, they’re everywhere. So don’t blame yourself when those things happen. Don’t let yesterday take up much of today.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

73. “It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It’s easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It’s making good that’s the hard part, it’s staying hopeful that’s the hard part! It’s staying in love that’s the hard part.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

76. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

77. “The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

78. “This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

79. “One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

80. “They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

81. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

82. “Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

83. “He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn’t make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one’s lover was also one’s therapist – how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job – it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

84. “At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

85. “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

86. “Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

87. “All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

88. “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

89. “Really?” “Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

90. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

91. “The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring – that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

92. “Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman’s direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

93. “But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

94. “Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world’s population have decided to give up on the pretense that “progress” or “development” or “prosperity” can be achieved for all eight billion of the world’s people.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

95. “Consciousness is the hard problem.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

96. “The past is always gone,” Wahram said. “Whether the place is still there or not.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

97. “The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

98. “Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

99. “Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

100. “The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab. said Fran Lebowitz.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson