Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

Gold rushes show who's powerful and who's not.

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

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.

Change never stops.

Things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.

It is a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matches your political purpose; and it never does. Best to strip all statements of real content, this is a basic law of diplomacy.

All empires, after death, have a long half-life.

True intimacy does not consist of sexual intercourse, which can be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consists of talking for hours about what is most important in one's life.

That's a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have.

Sometimes the beginning of a relationship determines how the rest of it will go.

Half a century in modern science is a long time.

Science is many things, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

We choose the ways we enforce our religious beliefs in the behavior of daily life. This is true of all cultures. And we can choose new ways.

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

When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently from when you expect to live only twenty.

He didn't like the aftermath of things. Everything seemed finished, done, revealed as pointless. It was always this way.

The pleasure and stability of dining rooms has always occurred against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm are things as fragile and temporary as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blow into existence.

Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approver. No, it was isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists.