# Red Mars

- Author: [Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson.md)
- Quotes: 39
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars

## Quotes

> In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

p. 431 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/in-games-there.md)

> The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots.

p. 395 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-weakness-of-businessmen.md)

> “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.”
>
> Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”

p. 88 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/being-on-mars.md)

> That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size.

p. 242 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/that-didnt-bother.md)

> And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

p. 555 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/and-then-she.md)

> Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

p. 85 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/beauty-was-the.md)

> Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

p. 137 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/science-was-many.md)

> Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

p. 460 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/some-of-them.md)

> There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.

p. 395 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/there-was-no-pleasure.md)

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

p. 394 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/money-equals-power.md)

> “You damned liberals.”
>
> “I don’t know what that means.”
>
> “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

p. 174 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/you-damned-liberals.md)

> Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

p. 375 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/most-ignorance-is-by-choice.md)

> Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots. These seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots, but even the best were mindless idiots.

p. 114 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/nadia-would-have.md)

> You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.

p. 221 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/you-cant-make.md)

> Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate.

p. 216 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/thus-they-were.md)

> Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred.

p. 276 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/very-little-detective.md)

> It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

p. 418 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/it-was-a-mistake.md)

> “The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

p. 177 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-beauty-of-mars.md)

> So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.

p. 205 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/so-life-adapts.md)

> “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”

p. 187 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/beauty-is-power.md)

> How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?

p. 526 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/how-was-it-that.md)

> 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.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-only-part.md)

> And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

p. 283 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/and-it-seemed.md)

> Well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided.

p. 284 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/well-societies-without.md)

> Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all.

p. 432 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/friendship-was-just.md)

> 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.

p. 461 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/it-was-a-world.md)

> For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them—if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful.

p. 398 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/for-of-course.md)

> They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

p. 452 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/they-were-so-ignorant.md)

> ...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

p. 299 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/theres-all-kinds.md)

> Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

p. 297 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/anyway-thats-a-large.md)

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

p. 465 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/historical-analogy-is-the.md)

> “Part of a team,” Ann said dully.
>
> “Well, you are.”
>
> “I know.” She sighed. “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.”

p. 158 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/part-of-a-team.md)

> Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

p. 7 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/ridiculous-but-lies.md)

> “You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
>
> ”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

p. 53 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/you-just-dont.md)

> Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/their-thinking-clashed.md)

> “And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

p. 5 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/and-with-our.md)

> “Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”
>
> “The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said.

p. 53 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/whenever-scientists-say.md)

> “But that may be Freudianism.”
>
> “In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
>
> She laughed. “Exactly.”

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/but-that-may.md)

> The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

p. 67 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-urge-to-excel.md)