Neal Stephenson Quotes

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Boredom is a mask frustration wears.”

— Neal Stephenson

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.”

— Neal Stephenson

“This Snow Crash thing
is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?”

— Neal Stephenson

“Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

— Neal Stephenson

If money is a science, then it is a dark science ... it has gone on developing ... by its own rules

— Neal Stephenson

“You should be a billionaire, Randy.
Thank god you're not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices - who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.”

— Neal Stephenson

“He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here, he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You-Rudy-and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us-it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.”

— Neal Stephenson

The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest.

— Neal Stephenson

“Being right does not always bring satisfaction,”

— Neal Stephenson

“The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.”

— Neal Stephenson

“You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them,”

— Neal Stephenson

“Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.”

— Neal Stephenson

Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite-the people who go into the Meatverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

— Neal Stephenson

“Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too.”

— Neal Stephenson

Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.

— Neal Stephenson

And yet people went on thinking this way, kind of in the way that someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness will go on getting up and going to work every morning, not so much out of habit as because the knowledge of impending doom makes them wish to assert an identity.

— Neal Stephenson

“SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.”

— Neal Stephenson

There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations.

— Neal Stephenson

“Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured the process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now.”

— Neal Stephenson

“A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.”

— Neal Stephenson

I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.

— Neal Stephenson

“If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigmaself > sigmaother has troubling implications-particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigmac are not fixed. If it weren't for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But sigmaself > sigmaother implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity and, therefore, his happiness. What a pain in the ass!”

— Neal Stephenson

“At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite.”

— Neal Stephenson

My son, in the eyes of Heaven, we are all as little children. No one of us is more important than another. In fact, the more important we think we are, the less we stand out in the eyes of the Lord.

— Neal Stephenson

“Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.”

— Neal Stephenson

Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.

— Neal Stephenson

“A fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy-but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits”

— Neal Stephenson

“A rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female.”

— Neal Stephenson

“How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?”

— Neal Stephenson

“The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality [ ... ]”

— Neal Stephenson

“Ammonia worked better, but it was dangerous, and you couldn't easily get more of it in space. If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy. A hundred years from now everything in space would be cooled by circulating water systems. But for now they had to keep the ammonia-based equipment running as well. Further”

— Neal Stephenson

“It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Tales; Kim had heard them all, several times over. They were nothing he hadn't heard before when Onghwe had set up his Circus in other cities. He started to walk toward”

— Neal Stephenson

“He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world.”

— Neal Stephenson

Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor

— Neal Stephenson

“Now there are many Shaftoes-mostly in Tennessee-but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him-the helpless, innocent victim, that is-into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something.”

— Neal Stephenson

Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate.

— Neal Stephenson

“Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it”

— Neal Stephenson

“Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?”

— Neal Stephenson

“Your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.”

— Neal Stephenson

“I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.”

— Neal Stephenson