Neal Stephenson Quotes
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But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.
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Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.
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One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.
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'It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.' 'I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that.''Well, I wouldn't say it in public.'
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Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.
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The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.
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'Why do they believe that?''Because we are hackers,' Csongor said, 'and they have seen movies.'
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…he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one’s own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers.
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For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
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Luisa chuckled. 'I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word-‘politics'-that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.'
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'They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.'
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In the whole world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.
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Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking…. Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. … there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.You just plug the pipes.
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The girl in the passenger seat said she had never before been in 'a car like this,' meaning, apparently, a sedan. Richard felt far beyond merely old.
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He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.
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By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be within a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive.
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Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. … They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
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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.
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Much pruning had taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.
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This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. … I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have … and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant.
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The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.
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These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible.