Highlights for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

“You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!”

Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days!

Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business.

It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention.

Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability.

Only three who could even try, and Frank’s French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet.

In practice, as last night had made clear, it had the U.N.’s usual toothlessness before national armies and transnational money.

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.

They are richer than us. And in this system, richer is more powerful.

If any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the U.N. would ostracize that nation. But because it is a matter of women, the men in power look away. They say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be interfered with. Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere.

Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.

Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

And as she cleaned the dishes, she felt her stiff throat move; she croaked out her part of the conversation, and helped, with her little strand, to weave the human illusion.

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