Kim Stanley Robinson

“It’s kind of scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.”

“Always.”

Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it.

After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up.

What we need is equality without conformity.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.

Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around.

It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.

Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on.

“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.

“Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.