Kim Stanley Robinson

"It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds."

"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."

"Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself."

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

"Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people."

"No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful."

"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 …"

"Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate."