Neal Stephenson Quotes

What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

The Moab hoaxers had inoculated the [Internet] with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone's uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect.

There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.

But I have to warn you that this is the word — ‘politics’ — that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.

— after that it's just a chase scene.

When he tried to filter out that bias and to look at the models and the data in a completely objective way, he concluded that the jury was still out. So, technical discussions of the matter tended to be unproductive, except insofar as they revealed the biases that the participants had brought into the room with them. And here was where it started to get difficult for him personally, because he couldn't understand why anyone would harbor a bias different from his own.

And Türing answered another,” Rudy said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.

“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

[I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.

There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It's been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.

Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving — no, demanding — of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.

...class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.

Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking....
Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals....there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes.

Ideology is a virus.