Charles Stross Quotes

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."

The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?

“But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”
Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”
“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.
“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.”
“But, terrorists!”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.

Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.

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

A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless.

They're too literal-minded," he said quietly. "All doing, no innovative thinking. They don't understand metaphors well; half of them think you're Baba Yaga returned, you know? We've been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas."

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

Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.

Unfortunately, it appeared that she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.

I don't like their system, and they know it. That's why I'm sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—" He shrugged. "Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don't like them as individuals, but that's not the same as wanting them dead. They're not monsters, and they don't deserve what's coming to them, and life isn't fair, is it?"

Time travel destabilizes history.
History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.

We have a problem, sir."
"What do you mean, a problem?" demanded the Admiral. "We're not supposed to have problems—that's the enemy's job!"

Do you believe in angels, Robard?" he asked faintly.
"No, sir."
"Well, that's alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y'know."

Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity." Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. "Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable; sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!