Neal Stephenson Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

There's no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you're granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind... knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible...

Neal Stephenson
Sokolov put the odds at 100 percent that Peter would, sooner or later, do something stupid and cause enormous trouble. Peter would do this because he believed he was clever and because he thought only of himself. It would be safer to take him out and shoot him now, but disposing of the body would be difficult and the shock of it would probably disturb the equilibrium of Zula.

Neal Stephenson
But in that we started so many things in that moment, we brought to their ends many others that have been the subject matter of this account, and so here is where I draw a line across the leaf and call it the end.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
I wanted to create an interesting scifi universe that didn't violate the laws of physics, and that means that you're limited to staying inside the solar system. I also wanted to get away from the ship-centric style of science fiction. Star Trek is ship-centric and it's all about the Enterprise — there are many other examples. What if we decided to get away from the obsession with ships and instead thought about big machines and structures that might be used to create a civilization inside the solar system?

Neal Stephenson
The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

Neal Stephenson
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.

Neal Stephenson
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,

Neal Stephenson
When I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something—something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.

Neal Stephenson
"Describe worrying," he went on.
"What!?"
"Pretend I'm someone who has never worried. I'm mystified. It don't get it. Tell me how to worry."
"Well... I guess the first step is to envision a sequence of events as they might play out in the future."
"But I do that all the time. And yet I don't worry."
"It is a sequence of events with a bad end."
"So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?"

Neal Stephenson
If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?

Neal Stephenson
Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness

Neal Stephenson
The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.

Neal Stephenson
But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn't bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone's well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.

Neal Stephenson
Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

Neal Stephenson
It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

Neal Stephenson
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

Neal Stephenson
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it

Neal Stephenson
Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

Neal Stephenson
Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.

Neal Stephenson
I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

Neal Stephenson
If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society,

Neal Stephenson
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

Neal Stephenson
Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

Neal Stephenson
Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

Neal Stephenson