Charles Stross Quotes
-
'Didn’t I have you executed last week?''I very much doubt. It.'
-
'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.'
-
'Bad day at the office?''It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.'
-
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.
-
The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
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.)
-
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.
-
I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.
-
As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.
-
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.
-
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
-
'The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’'
-
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.
-
Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility-woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.
-
I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.
-
Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.