Top 160 Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

102. “If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

103. “Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

104. “We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

105. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

106. “One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

107. “Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

108. “History is humankind trying to get a grip.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

109. “Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

110. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

111. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

112. “Freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

113. “What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

114. “The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

115. “Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

116. “But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

117. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

118. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

119. “All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

120. “Every astronomer loves the stars.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

121. “Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

122. “Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

123. “Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you – anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

124. “This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

126. “No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

127. “Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

128. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

129. “He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

130. “And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

131. “And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn’s stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

133. “But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

134. “Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

135. “One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

136. “Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

137. “Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

138. “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.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

139. “Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

140. “Mass demonstration and insurrection are the only things that will beat them, history shows this.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

141. “A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

142. “Also it isn’t clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

143. “Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

144. “The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

145. “You’re not a conventional man.” “No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! – the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

146. “Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn’t work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

147. “Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it’s hard to fix! Ha-ha.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

148. “Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

149. “So that human beings were miraculous indeed – conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

150. “Country Future Index. It’s an alternative to the GNP measurement, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson