Charles Stross Quotes

Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.

People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.

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.

Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching.

I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.

They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob.

A man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels.

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

Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent."

Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates.

I’m stranded in limbo, otherwise known as downtown Denver.

Will you stop calling me a child!"
Rachel hunched around in her chair and stared at him. "But you are, you know. Even if you were sixty years old, you'd still be a child to me. As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you're a child. You could fuck your way through every brothel in New Prague, and you'd still be an overgrown schoolboy." She looked at him sadly. "What would you call a parent who never let their children grow up? That's what we think of your government."

I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.

The Laundry is the British Government’s secret agency for dealing with “magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so “magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the...things...that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job—applied computational demonologist—comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don’t survive to claim it.

It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.