Kim Stanley Robinson's take on politics

"The battle for control of science went on.  Many administrations and Congresses hadn't wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see.  It might get in the way of business.  They didn't want to know.

"For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime.  It was incomprehensible to her: they didn't want to know.  And yet they did want to call the shots.  To Anna this ways clearly crazy. . . .  On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well?  Were these two parts of the same insanity?"

-Forty Signs of Rain, a novel that might justly be called the thinking person's The Day After Tomorrow