Kim Stanley Robinson

They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

Anyone can agree that things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem.

Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?

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

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.

“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!”

“Have you told her that?”

“You bet I have, but Hiroko only listens to me when I say things she wants to hear.” He cackled. “Same as with everyone, right?”

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

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.

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

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