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.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore, it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Hangzhou from the Haudenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Miranda from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth around, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don’t you?

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

...knowing to that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Nothing was ever normal again. Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

— Kim Stanley Robinson