Charles Stross Quotes
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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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I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.
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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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'The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’'
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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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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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'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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Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.
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Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
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You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots-it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.
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Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
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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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I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.
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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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The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?
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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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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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It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.
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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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Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.
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He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.
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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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As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.