Charles Stross Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

'I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.

Charles Stross
Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

Charles Stross
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.

Charles Stross
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

Charles Stross
Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her—it's always hard to tell with Mom—things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

Charles Stross
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Charles Stross
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.

Charles Stross
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.)

Charles Stross
His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.

Charles Stross
Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

Charles Stross
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.

Charles Stross
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Charles Stross
Bad day at the office?
It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.

Charles Stross
She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way.

Charles Stross
Friendly fascism, says Sadeq. It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.

Charles Stross
She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.

Charles Stross
I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

Charles Stross
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.

Charles Stross
But information isn't free. It can't be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn't they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!

Charles Stross
A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.

Charles Stross
Not everyone is concerned with the deep future, Manfred interrupts. It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter—that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –
Manfred?
He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

Charles Stross
There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.
These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's-a-Rolex brigade.

Charles Stross
Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night.

Charles Stross
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

Charles Stross
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Charles Stross
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Charles Stross
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Charles Stross
The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

Charles Stross
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Charles Stross
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!

Charles Stross