Charles Stross Quotes

You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

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.

If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic.

I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist. Consequently, I’d much rather dismiss theology and religious belief as superstitious rubbish. My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism...except that I know too much.
See, we did evolve more or less randomly. And the little corner of the universe we live in is 13.73 billion years old, not 5,000 years old. And there’s no omnipotent, omniscient, invisible sky daddy in the frame for the problem of pain. So far so good: I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist.
Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren’t normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones...aren’t friendly.
(See? I told you I’d rather be an atheist!)

His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

I don’t get enough practice at killing people to not feel bad about it; I hope I never do, although that’s looking like a forlorn wish these days.

And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies:

It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.

In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

I don’t hate him—he’s just a bore but that isn’t a capital offense. Usually.

Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it.

There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.

True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.

Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction.