Neal Stephenson Quotes

I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.

What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?

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

The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another...As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real...The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it.

“Those guys are troglodytes,” he said, “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”

As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it's named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s...I'm still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don't even know why I bother.

Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.
It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet.

"The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn’t care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here — " he points to his head " — in the intelligence of the people, and here — " he holds out his hands " — in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details.

... you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ...

“I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”

there is no honour among consultants.

Unfortunately, this category of secret is itself so secret that it's very existance is secret, and he can't actually reveal it to anyone.

Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.