Neal Stephenson Quotes

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

"And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle — all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe — for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient."

None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart's lot.
“I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore.
“Blast radius?"
“It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”

They made data a controlled substance.

Having caught Phil's eye, Sophia panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn't Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level.
“Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.” It was a reference to...a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren't going to be drawn into a fake argument.
The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on:
1. Speech is aggression
2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser
3. Curiosity is feigned
4. Lying is performative
5. Stupidity is power

"I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there."
There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.

Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.

CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic.

All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days,” she said, deadpan.

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.