Charles Stross Short Quotes

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Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

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

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

Charles Stross
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

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

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

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

Charles Stross
Can I remember— I remember lots, I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

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

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

Charles Stross
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

Charles Stross
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Charles Stross
In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

Charles Stross
You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.

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

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

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

Charles Stross
—but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

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
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'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

Charles Stross
I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Charles Stross
Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

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
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.

Charles Stross
Democracy 2.0. He shudders briefly. I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.

Charles Stross
The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

Charles Stross