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Quotes from Blue Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson

born 1952 United States

← All quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

39 quotes

Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.

Blue Mars (1996)

Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself.

Blue Mars (1996)

Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have to consider it less than successful, okay?

Blue Mars (1996)

Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it.

Blue Mars (1996)

Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?

Blue Mars (1996)

It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.

Blue Mars (1996)

Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique.

Blue Mars (1996)

Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if she only exerted herself hard enough, the world would change. Now she knew better.

Blue Mars (1996)

Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.

Blue Mars (1996)

Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites.

Blue Mars (1996)

Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it.

Blue Mars (1996)

We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.

Blue Mars (1996)

A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?

Blue Mars (1996)

It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power.

Blue Mars (1996)

No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.

Blue Mars (1996)

But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.

Blue Mars (1996)

After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up.

Blue Mars (1996)

One could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following—that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth century existed to prove.

Blue Mars (1996)

You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.

Blue Mars (1996)

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.

Blue Mars (1996)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kim Stanley Robinson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.