Charles Stross Quotes

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.

I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad.

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.

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

I was hoping you might be able to help me with a question of character."
"Character." Angleton doesn't seem at all put out by Lockhart's refusal; he leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "There's a word I don't hear often enough these days. Especially coming from you."
"Of course not." Lockhart is dismissive. "It's a subjective value judgment and those don't sit comfortably with ticky-boxes and objective performance metrics."

Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label."
"But they're Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it's Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?"

We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)

Sometimes people do good things for bad reasons, and sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. He isn’t sure which this is yet, but he’s hoping for the former.

Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.

There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.

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

Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by jet lag.

Suppose rather than passing the plate in church, they get a radio show and pass the plate and half a million listeners donate. Isn’t that going to convince a preacher that it’s all true? Wealth comes to the faithful, that’s the message they’re going to take. An’ I never yet met a con man who wasn’t the better at the job for believing his own spiel.”
“That’s not…untrue. But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it. He might have started out as a true believer, but money has a way of taking over. A church is a business, after all, and those employees or executives who are good at raising money are promoted by their fellows.”

There's a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn't necessarily follow that they're trying to summon up the elder gods."