Green Earth Quotes

“If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, had pushed for a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being. After that it was one battle after another,”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“During the day he dropped by his storage locker in Encinitas and got some gear, and that night he parked the van on La Jolla Farms Road and walked out onto the bluff between Scripps and Blacks canyons. This plateau, owned by UCSD, had been left empty, a rare thing. In fact it might be the only one left.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“No, they were cheerful, which was different than happy; a policy, rather than a feeling.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“It’s one world now. The United States still has its historical role to fulfill, as the country of countries, the mixture and amalgam of all humanity, trying things out and seeing how they work. The United States is child of the world, you might say, and the world watches with the usual parental fascination and horror, anxiety and pride. “So we have to grow up. If we were to turn into just another imperial bully and idiot, the story of history would be ruined, its best hope dashed. We have to give up the bad, give back the good. Franklin Roosevelt described what was needed from America very aptly, in a time just as dangerous as ours: he called for a course of ‘bold and persistent experimentation.’ That’s what I plan to do also. No more empire, no more head in the sand pretending things are okay. It’s time to join the effort to invent a global civilization that we can hand off to all the children and say, ‘This will work, keep it going, make it better.’ That’s permaculture, as some people call it, and really now we have no choice; it’s either permaculture or catastrophe. Let’s choose the good fight, and work so that our generation”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Judging from the evolutionary history of the brain, it seemed clear that feelings had entered the picture in prehuman species, as part of social behaviors. Sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, pride, submission, censure and recompense, disgust (at cheaters), altruism, compassion: these were social feelings, and arrived early on, before language. And they were perhaps more important than conscious thought, as overall cognitive strategy was formed by unconscious mentation in regions such as the ventromedial frontal lobe (right behind the nose). Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal, which goal ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Knowledge is important, but much more important is the use toward which it is put. This depends on the heart and mind of the one who uses it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one’s surroundings and one’s reactions, and one’s thoughts.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“I was told that one senior person at NSF finished reading the trilogy and immediately sold his house and moved into a camper in a trailer park. That’s taking things too far, probably, but I like the impulse, because we read novels to help create our sense of what the world means, to mentally travel in other people’s lives, and to get some laughs. So whether you light out for the territory afterward or not, read on, reader, and may this story help and entertain you. And thanks. Kim Stanley Robinson, February 2015”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not do anything. It was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A type of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don’t want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin’s biggest messes.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“It’s like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth