Charles Stross Quotes

I imagine looking after a sixteen-year-old must be a bit of a headache.
""Oh, it's mostly about building trust. She's still in the ugh, parents, uncool stage, but she's self-aware enough to know that it's just something she's going through. So I'm trying to give her enough space that she doesn't feel the need to burn bridges she might want to maintain later. The best thing you can do is provide them with a support framework rather than a cage. Don't try to micromanage and overprotect them, let them know they can come to you when they've got problems, and as long as they've got a reasonably level head, that's what they'll do." He pauses. "And I try to keep a poker face whenever she introduces me to a boyfriend."

And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?

If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures.

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

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

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

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

The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...

(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))

Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity.

Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all.

But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?"
"I can think of several." I cross my legs. "Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible."

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted.

Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate.