Blue mars Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: Blue Mars
Quotes of Book: Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not even believed such creatures were possible, because of surface area-to-volume constraints, but there they were, clumping around like intelligent robots, so the little red scientists had to explain them. To get some help they climbed up into the humans' reference books, and read up on ants. They learned about the ants' pheromones, and they synthesized the ones they needed to control the soldier ants of a particularly small docile red species, and after that, they were in business. Little red cavalry. They charged around everywhere on antback, having a fine old time, twenty or thirty of them on each ant, like pashas on elephants. Look close at enough ants and you'll see them, right there on top.But the little red scientists continued to read the texts, and learned about human pheromones. They went back to the rest of the little red people, awestruck and appalled. Now we know why these humans are such trouble, they reported. Humans have no more will than these ants we are riding around on. They are giant meat ants. The little red people tried to comprehend such a travesty of life.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
You've located intrinsic worth in the wrong place," she said to all of them, over the common band. "It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting 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."
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
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.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
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.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ Blue Mars
A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area.
book-quote