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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4e78fa9 | Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value -- seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does -- it is a shared phant'sy. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 86dee18 | And so what moved him onward and down the office building's stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bb6703b | Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any commandos in tracksuits. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f522beb | The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as 'near-fatal.' 'But it's okay,' he'd said, 'you'll black out before anything really bad happens to you. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3e7a2bf | There was no way that these guys were going to let a bleeding, barefoot woman simply wander off alone into the streets. Two of them were already running toward her with hands reaching out in a manner that, in normal circumstances, would have seemed just plain ungentlemanly. What would have been designated, in a Western office, as a hostile environment was soon in full swing as numerous rough strong hands were all over her, easing her to a c.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ef9533e | Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!" Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!" Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!" Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something g.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a3e99f7 | She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul ("Yay, going on a trip!") even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2c50b67 | She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn't feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 12341b9 | Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 019dd40 | But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. Y.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1006e7e | But Henry wasn't a parent, and he didn't understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 661ec44 | It would be easier," Doob said, "if I could figure out what the hell she wanted." "You're assuming," Luisa said, "that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2d401ce | There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5ad629c | No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d25bd69 | Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 05ed2ae | I see there are no heroes any more. Where is my head of Joseph Kony on a plate? Slice him thinly so there's enough to go around. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d1a557d | You know," said Jack, "I was a King for a while in Hindoostan, and my subjects would get worked up into a lather about a potato, which to them was worth as much as a treasure-chest. At first I'd want to know everything about the potato in question, and I would take a large stake in the matter, but towards the end of my reign--" Here Jack rolled his eyes, as Frenchmen frequently did during encounters with Englishmen. Leroy seemed to take his.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1307308 | he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4306dc8 | The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique." (describing a young man who flew off a bicycle at high speed)" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fcf614f | If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy. | philosophy religion science | Neal Stephenson | |
| 72e0eff | Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him-the helpless, innocent victim, that is-into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a di.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a1902ef | But what little I'd heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c204b8d | It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn't have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn't have to decide. She just had to pass on the news. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d6aea15 | He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 62e96ce | Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e5e5902 | Cord followed up with, "I like it here, but it's beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it's creepy?" "You're talking to a bunch of guys," Yul said. "No one here is going to validate your feelings." She tossed sand at him." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 929080d | But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 293825b | Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end. | sysadmin | Neal Stephenson | |
| b607998 | Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e898178 | If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs,.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 49c0f19 | Human nature doesn't change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that." He snaps his fingers." -- | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f927815 | When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7bd2a4c | Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion 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 advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are alrea.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8013d98 | He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d056914 | Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0ffa563 | That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see," Orolo told me. "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." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f9909b2 | Maybe we should go back and get their guns," Marlon suggested. "That's how it would work in a video game," Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 893125c | Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite-the people who go into the Meatverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer language.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1bf316e | Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e2df682 | people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3f228fc | Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cdfec33 | You're going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan--then what? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 143e5d5 | he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| eeff621 | Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead. | Neal Stephenson |