Neal Stephenson Quotes

“The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.”

— Neal Stephenson

“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it ... The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier.”

— Neal Stephenson

It had been a hell of a long time since he had been reduced to hiding behind a tree, and he did not view it as much of a professional achievement.

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

“Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.”

— Neal Stephenson

“That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme-of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.”

— Neal Stephenson

“There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It's just like the reviews promised-other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger's end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis scheme must have finally found a taker.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Fighting isn't about knowing how. It's about deciding to.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex."
"He's dead, by the way."
"Again? I am glad to hear it.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source ... As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah, Waterhouse says, or words to that effect.”

— Neal Stephenson

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.

— Neal Stephenson

Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.

— Neal Stephenson

“All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west”

— Neal Stephenson

“But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete-right, Vic?”

— Neal Stephenson

Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says. "What's wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.

— Neal Stephenson

“To be in a habitat-even a quite large and cosmopolitan one-when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on.”

— Neal Stephenson

“I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The commentary came from millions of idiots on the Internet.”

— Neal Stephenson

“A collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach),”

— Neal Stephenson

We are all in trouble ... with a bunch of dead people.

— Neal Stephenson

“It didn't matter whether "football" for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets.”

— Neal Stephenson

“How could a man become a god?" Nell asked. "By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought”

— Neal Stephenson

“The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.”

— Neal Stephenson

People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.

— Neal Stephenson

“She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high,”

— Neal Stephenson

Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood.

— Neal Stephenson

“Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?”

— Neal Stephenson

It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist
it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements
and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle Music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.

— Neal Stephenson

“This is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up-sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year-but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The Templar and Hospitaller commanders had argued with Calpurnius, the master of the Shield-Brethren company, as to the membership of the team that would lead the upper-floor assault. Calpurnius had listened calmly to both men's arguments and then asked one question. There will be no horses on this boat. How will your knights fight?”

— Neal Stephenson

I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish
this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.

— Neal Stephenson

“People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey.”

— Neal Stephenson

Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend-he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible-but

— Neal Stephenson

How does a poor country defeat rich ones?" "Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it." "Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?" "But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel." "Currency!" "Indeed.

— Neal Stephenson

“Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I'd have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It's not who I am or what I do. I'm a novelist.”

— Neal Stephenson