Quotes

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

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars Chapter 2 (1992)

This is a great quote. It’s true, I think, that these things are usually beautiful. But it’s worth paying attention to the times when they are not. Power, particularly can be turned to evil and then it is one of the most ugly things we can imagine. It’s quite possible to be elegantly cruel and not hard at all to be elegantly unkind. The same goes for intelligence.

For the other qualities listed here it seems much more difficult to distort them into ugliness.

What do you think? Leave a reply with some thoughts or examples.