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Quotes from Red Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson

born 1952 United States

← All quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

30 quotes

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.

Red Mars (1992)

That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size.

Red Mars (1992)

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

Red Mars (1992)

Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred.

Red Mars (1992)

Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

Red Mars (1992)

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

Red Mars (1992)

You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.

Red Mars (1992)

And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

Red Mars (1992)

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

Red Mars (1992)

“But that may be Freudianism.”
“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”

Red Mars (1992)

“You damned liberals.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

Red Mars (1992)

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

Red Mars (1992)

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

Red Mars (1992)

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

Red Mars (1992)

Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all.

Red Mars (1992)

There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.

Red Mars (1992)

Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate.

Red Mars (1992)

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

Red Mars (1992)

Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

Red Mars (1992)

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

Red Mars (1992)

Attribution

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