Top 36 Quotes & Sayings by Kim Stanley

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

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).

None of us know our real names.

First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

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.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

The distinguishing mark of true adventures, is that it is often no fun at all while they are actually happening.

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.

What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.

The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.

We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.

The command to be free is a double bind

Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back

Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder

Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.