"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 (Blue Mars)

"We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (The Years of Rice and Salt)

"All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Sixty Days and Counting)

"Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars)

"So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom. "
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"All their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment's touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves."
— Kim Stanley Robinson

"Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
...
Fate is the path of least action."
— Kim Stanley Robinson

"History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do."
— Kim Stanley Robinson

"What we need is equality without conformity."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"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 (Red Mars)

"Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars)

"But lies were what people wanted; that was politics."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars)

"Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Antarctica)

"
"Oh God," Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. "It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore." "
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"
Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"It seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear."
— Kim Stanley Robinson

"The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything? "
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Down and Out in the Year 2000)

"The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. "
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Blue Mars)

"And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another. "
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Blue Mars)

"Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars)

"I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Pacific Edge: Three Californias)

"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 (Pacific Edge: Three Californias)

"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."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century’s war dead."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Remaking History and Other Stories)

"keep your friends close and your frenemies closer"
— Kim Stanley Robinson

"Language is but a huge set of false analogies. there has to be a better way to make a point."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Antarctica)