Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. - Neal Stephenson

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done.