It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it… — Kim Stanley Robinson
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. 418Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.
p. 431
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
“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
