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353d18b
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And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c568136
|
Gold is the corpse of value...
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money
value
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Neal Stephenson |
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75f6992
|
I beg your pardon?" Robson says. One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault."
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Neal Stephenson |
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fd25ec3
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THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b1073ee
|
We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. "Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving--no, demanding--of love. Ordering matte..
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Neal Stephenson |
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14997c3
|
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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Neal Stephenson |
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485837e
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All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c0cb5ea
|
Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
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Neal Stephenson |
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024d421
|
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e897a4f
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Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ba30d96
|
When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has t..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6d7ddc9
|
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an ssertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly adv..
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nerds
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Neal Stephenson |
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88c2110
|
But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2a19b0d
|
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bon..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e7bace2
|
Enoch...why are you here? Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
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Neal Stephenson |
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c0abdac
|
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
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god
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Neal Stephenson |
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b4220f7
|
But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamor..
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Neal Stephenson |
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eaf1470
|
Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free..
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war
society
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Neal Stephenson |
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20c914d
|
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.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bc93fc3
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This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
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predestination
labyrinth
question
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Neal Stephenson |
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ef065db
|
The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard's unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6a07bc0
|
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2c7df27
|
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
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socially-inept
social
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Neal Stephenson |
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53ca32e
|
the difference between poets and mystics . . . The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
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truth
symbol
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Neal Stephenson |
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8b03c51
|
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building t..
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urban-sprawl
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Neal Stephenson |
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c8996a3
|
Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.
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relationships
women
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Neal Stephenson |
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9f319c0
|
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness
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Neal Stephenson |
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a43d42b
|
Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
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recreation
synthesis
thought
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Neal Stephenson |
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ba851c1
|
Besides, interesting things happen along borders--transitions--not in the middle where everything is the same.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b4c3a45
|
If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.
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self-reliance
safety
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Neal Stephenson |
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759537e
|
He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7b7de19
|
We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.
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bravery
future
humanity
intelligence
brainiac
breed
caveman
gatherer
hunter-gatherer
intensive-care
patients
athleticism
hunter
complexity
geeks
society
genius
brains
nerds
hospital
mastery
technology
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Neal Stephenson |
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ed5849a
|
any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.
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Neal Stephenson |
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75eb1d5
|
Ideology is a virus.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1d2a0df
|
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
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Neal Stephenson |
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774a59f
|
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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Neal Stephenson |
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91e8018
|
The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a5776ee
|
There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies
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Neal Stephenson |
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bb31758
|
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old marke..
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progress
|
Neal Stephenson |
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e7fa35c
|
Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6553a89
|
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.
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Neal Stephenson |
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75ceb30
|
Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters." Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little."
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Neal Stephenson |
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8518660
|
They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue. The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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15dc7e8
|
he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility,..
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Neal Stephenson |