Kim Stanley quotes:

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever.

In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

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.

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.

First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

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

None of us know our real names.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.

Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back

Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.

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.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

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

The command to be free is a double bind

The distinguishing mark of true adventures, is that it is often no fun at all while they are actually happening.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.

We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.

What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.

You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.