Home > Work > Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)
61 " We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems that the current order defeated. "
― Kim Stanley Robinson , Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)
62 " And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other. "
63 " Liberal democracy says that cultural tolerance is essential, but you don’t have to get very far away from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to get very intolerant. "
64 " History directing evolution. "
65 " As a general rule, Diana said, impactors were about one-tenth the size of the crater or basin they made (like historical figures, Maya thought); "
66 " not know or had scarcely heard of, like Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe. "
67 " shikata ga nai, "
68 " She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself. "
69 " Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples.… "
70 " Christiaan Huygens "
71 " That’s the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That’s crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it’s the system that has to change. "
72 " But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. "
73 " unearthly. "
74 " A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there’s trouble.” “Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary. "
75 " Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on. "
76 " The captain pointed to the south, and Maya saw a line of icebergs fly into the air as if propelled by explosives, arcing in various directions and falling back onto the ice, breaking into thousands of pieces. “Maybe we’d better back off a little,” the captain said. “It would be better for my reputation if we did not get shot out of the sky by an iceberg. "
77 " viriditas, "
78 " Shikata ga nai,” Maya said sardonically. There is no other choice. "
79 " in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations—extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them. Frank had said something like that: colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops. We’re all colonies of the transnats. "
80 " That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade. "