Charles Stross Quotes

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.

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

No, Bob," she says tiredly, "mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there'll be an argument, and it'll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers."

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

Governments are machines for producing and implementing legal frameworks.

The iron law of bureaucracy doesn’t help: everybody working to ensure that the organization continues to pay them a salary, rather than necessarily achieving its objectives.

But all these mitigating techniques have severe drawbacks, and as a result there are old ritual magicians, and there are bold ritual magicians, but there are no old, bold magicians. They don’t survive, and they tend to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principle of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable.

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

Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.

Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ grinder a memo.”

When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fracking for oil in the basement.

It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause.

You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now.

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

What happens if we don't do this?"
"I don't know. Probably we don't die. I mean, maybe probably. Possibly maybe probably."