History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking -- an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything. Kim Stanley Robinson More Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson More Quotes From Kim Stanley Robinson That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. Kim Stanley Robinson libertarian police want And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. Kim Stanley Robinson flower morning beautiful The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Muhammad's wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. [...] The ulema have twisted the Quran with their hadith, always twisting it toward those in power, until the message Muhammad laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse. Kim Stanley Robinson hadith veils wife When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check. Kim Stanley Robinson invisible-hand environment hands Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists. Kim Stanley Robinson scientist weapons science Rock is much more malleable than ideas. Kim Stanley Robinson rocks ideas Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Kim Stanley Robinson struggle names forever The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. Kim Stanley Robinson libertarian police want 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. Kim Stanley Robinson important mistake people What we need is equality without conformity. Kim Stanley Robinson conformity needs Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit. Kim Stanley Robinson easier littles world Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. Kim Stanley Robinson psychology trying long One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself. Kim Stanley Robinson chiefs incompetence inability When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal. Kim Stanley Robinson assembling paranormal common But lies were what people wanted; that was politics. Kim Stanley Robinson wanted lying people I think the US is in a terrible state of denial. Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Kim Stanley Robinson denial flames thinking 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 cold ends dream We ought to be keeping in mind that the technology is not just hardware and machinery, it is also software. So you can think of languages of the technology and writing of the technology and the social justice of the technology in what social justice does is reduce impacts on the Earth because the most impact is from the poorest and richest people. Kim Stanley Robinson technology writing thinking There's Jevon's paradox that the better we get at efficiently using energy the more energy we use; so that and that machine technology improvements per se do not necessarily reduce our impacts because we immediately double down on how much we use. Kim Stanley Robinson technology improvement energy Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's constant pressure, pushing towards pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call 'Viriditas' and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. Kim Stanley Robinson inward cosmos looks
