119 quotes
“Have you told her that?”
“You bet I have, but Hiroko only listens to me when I say things she wants to hear.” He cackled. “Same as with everyone, right?”
Green Mars (1993)
Rumors flew like bats at dusk.
In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”
Green Mars (1993)
Dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force.
Blue Mars (1996)
Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making.
Well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided.
Red Mars (1992)
There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex.
Blue Mars (1996)
It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself.
Green Mars (1993)
It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.
Red Mars (1992)
People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!
Blue Mars (1996)
Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.
Blue Mars (1996)
Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them.
Blue Mars (1996)
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.
Blue Mars (1996)
History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over.
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.
Blue Mars (1996)
Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet had been right (they weren’t always).
Blue Mars (1996)
So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.
Red Mars (1992)
In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color.
Blue Mars (1996)
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 or an equation.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.
Blue Mars (1996)