Green Mars Quotes

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“What we need is equality without conformity.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“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

“Sax had always been so uninterested in [power and gain] that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend all one's time protecting it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“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

“Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. … And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of a flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“That’s the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That’s crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it’s the system that has to change.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).”
― 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

“
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

“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

“Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Country Future Index. It’s an alternative to the GNP measurement, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere-the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are-from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the planet itself had felt something missing, and at the tap of mind against rock, noosphere against lithosphere, the absent biosphere had sprung into the gap with the startling suddenness of a magician's paper flower”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“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