Charles Stross Quotes
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Time travel destabilizes history.History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.
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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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'Bad day at the office?''It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.'
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Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
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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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True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.
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You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief.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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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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'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 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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Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.
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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 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 Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?
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Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.
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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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'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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You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.
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'We have a problem, sir.''What do you mean, a problem?' demanded the Admiral. 'We’re not supposed to have problems-that’s the enemy’s job!'
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If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
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A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless.
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As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.
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Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition-his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.
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Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.