Kim Stanley Robinson

I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal.
I died as animal and I was human.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above.
And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.’

“Whether it be of this world or of that,
Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”

And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added togethe

had become a glaciologist to indulge his introverted personality while still holding down a job

“We are the Ministry for the Future,” Estevan insisted to her, “not the ministry to solve all possible problems that can be solved now. We have to pick our battles or else it becomes just an everything.”

I think the principle was set at Nuremberg— you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong.”

If at first you don’t succeed—
You’ll never get funded again.

Arctic permafrost contained as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp, if released, would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans