Neal Stephenson Quotes
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'This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’'
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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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'I don’t think you are actually retired,' Corvallis pointed out mildly.…'It’s a selective retirement,' Richard explained, 'a retirement from boring shit.''I think that’s called a promotion.'
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The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
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Any strategy that involves crossing a valley-accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance-will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
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Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.
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Tris was pudgy and not especially good looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she'd been raised in a math.
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'Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?''Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.''Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.''That’d be great.'
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Yul had simply launched himself at the guy from some distance away, and body-checked him at full speed, stopping on a dime in midair as he transferred all of his energy into the target. 'Conservation of momentum,' he announced, 'it's not just a good idea-it's the law!'
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What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.
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The young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant 'Touchdown!' and, from a woman, 'I will hug you now!'
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One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
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'Ha ha noob, you are pwned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key'
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IF YOU ARE ACCUSTOMED to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own, skip this Note. Otherwise, know that the scene in which this book is set is not Earth, but a planet called Arbre that is similar to Earth in many ways.
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The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.
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'Welcome to the GWOJ.' 'GWOJ?' 'Global War on Jones.'
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Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.
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The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
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He could only conjecture what style pheromones Zula was throwing off to her peers, but to him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.
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There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that 'A's hire A's, and B's hire C's,' the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to sign up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.
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'Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.'
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Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
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Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.
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Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.