Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

The past is gone. Thinking about it will only make you melancholy.

Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s—the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recombinant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.

It’s inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they’re in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced.”

“Don’t be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems that the current order defeated.”

“Every generation is its own secret society.

Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.”