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Book: Red Mars
Quotes of Book: Red Mars
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  1. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    Thus when Hiroko came up and said, "Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position," Nadia sang to her, "That's the only thing I'm thinking of- baby!" and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. "The engineer's solution," she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn't hammer a nail straight.And that night she talked over the day's work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of "Ain't Misbehavin'" chasing her off to sleep.
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  2. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    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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  3. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    The rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wet past. Or something like that. Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
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  4. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than any real thing. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last
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  5. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along."
    book-quotepromisesoratoryrhetoric

  6. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money--that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation." She waved her hand in disgust.
    book-quotemoneybusinesscorruption

  7. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so
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  8. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient.
    book-quoterobber-barons

  9. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    That's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
    book-quotepowereconomicspower-structure

  10. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.
    book-quotepolitics

  11. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together-while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.
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  12. Kim Stanley Robinson _ Red Mars

    Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
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