Charles Stross Quotes

Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.
This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence.

Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die.
To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings.

She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth.

Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It's about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is." A wan smile crept across her face. "Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we're doing the right thing, which is why we're in this mess."

We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.

I’m still wearing my shoes, I realize. And I’m still wearing this fucking suit. I didn’t even take it off for the flight—I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie’s snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they’re not throttling their victims.

They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.

Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way.

Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label."
"But they're Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it's Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?"

I don’t understand exactly what she thinks we need to talk about, but maybe that’s half the problem.

Freedom?" The word tastes bitter. "What's freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I've been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?"
She's silent for only a moment. "Ask not what it's gotten you, kid. Ask what it's saved you from."

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.