Neal Stephenson Quotes
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I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.
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If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
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Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.
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As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
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Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.
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They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
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"The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique."
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The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it
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One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.
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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
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Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.
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The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
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It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
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Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
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If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.
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Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.
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Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
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Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
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Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.
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Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
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Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
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The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
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I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
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So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
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For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
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You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.
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Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
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Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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