Kim Stanley Robinson

"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."

"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."

"There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent futu…"

"She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach …"