Charles Stross Quotes
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’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
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It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.
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Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.
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'A cure for old age is a very common wish,' Kurtz observed. 'Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.'
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'You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?' Sirhan prods. 'What was it like then?''What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,' she says dismissively. 'We knew it would be okay.'
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The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
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Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
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The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.'
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You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.
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Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.
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Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the 'big' and 'swinging' and he’s right.
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I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.
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You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
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Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.
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Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.
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The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?
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Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
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Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
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Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.
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I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.
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'He’s an artist,' she said calmly. 'I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe-shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction.'
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It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?
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As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.