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

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistatic) Pg. 128

— Kim Stanley Robinson

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious— the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all...time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis— or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . . To go from that to the mundane problematic...was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lie around them in the weeds.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

We demand justice," Jeff says. "We don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice."" And conditions are ripe, is that what you're saying?"" Very ripe. People are pissed off. They're scared for their kids. That's the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth's law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn't have to get all bloody and lead to a theocracy of violent revolutionaries. If you can work. And conditions are ripe.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

— Kim Stanley Robinson