Kim Stanley Quotes
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An excess of reason is itself a form of madness
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Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder
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First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.
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A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.
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When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?
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The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—
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Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.
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In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
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You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).
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Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.
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Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.
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In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
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Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.
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The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.
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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.
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We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.
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You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.
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It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.
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Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.
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None of us know our real names.
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It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
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Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.
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It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
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It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.
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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.
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The invisible hand never picks up the check.
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The command to be free is a double bind
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It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.
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Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape
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Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.
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