Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all.

Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.

Nostalgia, the intense ache for one’s past, desire for one’s past—not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been, and now was gone.

They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything.

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme.

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died;