Kim Stanley Robinson

We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need.

Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.

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.

You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.

You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions?

As a system for generating answers.

And what is the purpose of that?

...To know.

And what will you do with your knowledge?

...Find out more.

But why?

I don’t know. It’s the way I am.

Every generation is its own secret society.

Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them.

Dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force.

People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.

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

Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.

Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.