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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3d2c597 | Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 036a6d6 | What should we be doing in the meantime?" "All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f78f9e0 | When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4d00cc0 | Domingo regarded the man for a moment before answering. "The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae do not hire themselves out as caravan guards," he said finally. "There are several hundred men-at-arms in Barcelona who would satisfy your needs." "I know none of them," Jacobi replied. "Nor their reputations." Domingo made a noise in his chest and idly reached over to scratch the end of his shortened arm. Andreas had only been at the Shield-Brethren.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c1e83cd | Spoken like a true Nipponese," Enoch says bitterly. "You never change." "Please make me understand what you are saying." "What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of the widow who has no husband to work, no children to support her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books and schoolhouses?" "You can shower gold on them," Goto Dengo says. "Soon enough, it will all be gone.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 74c16b4 | THE ROUGH TIMBERS of the monastery wall were aged and warped, and there were numerous gaps and holes in the wood. Covered in pitch, they were a poor defensive barrier, if they had ever been intended as such. Cnan and Finn approached the wood cautiously and dared to peek through the gaps. Whereupon | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ca6ad2d | Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 06b1e6b | The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 923a8e6 | If the gathering had included more veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7cfc402 | Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d90616b | And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6c27e80 | Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. "Topology is destiny," he said, and put the drawers on." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f2ca282 | BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements--this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f4ddcb5 | Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6eae596 | Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b4cec31 | Judge Fang got to eat this way only when someone really important was trying to taint him, and though he had never knowingly allowed his judicial judgment to be swayed, he did enjoy the chow. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e0ff4f8 | Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon and the United States of America are disputing--with rifles--each other's right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting helple.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7be59a7 | Remember, these things are designed for amateurs." "Tell me about it," Ivy snorted. "The user interface is so easy to use, I can't do anything." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 30def8f | Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| dcd8435 | If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations--like a computer." Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being." "Well . . . this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer." Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a1566e2 | He gave them descriptive names that wouldn't scare people. It wouldn't do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e499114 | The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7230fcd | What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him. "Observing," father would say. "But how long can you observe the same thing?" "Forever." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 33ef10a | Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 70c6db1 | So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer." "Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 61eb9a5 | Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations--whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes--without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fb60554 | To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5570521 | His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c8219f7 | Fighting isn't about knowing how," Ty said. "It's about deciding to." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1f424c7 | Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan's physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c7f5837 | I don't even know how to describe it. 'Ragtag' makes it sound like more than it is. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| aec6fa9 | but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f39db89 | Yur heaved a sigh, then continued in a more moderate tone: "Never mind. I see it now. It's some kind of Purpose thing. Above my pay grade. You should have just told me." He drew himself up and saluted. "What are my orders, sir?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 799ca8e | People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0072933 | They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 97a289f | 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 speech flourish. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6c56ee9 | Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| eda9dc5 | The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 59abf5a | What is BFR?" asked Pete Starling. For the graph's vertical scale was labeled thus. "Bolide Fragmentation Rate," Doob said. "The rate at which new rocks are being produced." "Is that a standard term?" Pete wanted to know. His tone was not so much hostile as unnerved. "No," Doob said, "I made it up. Yesterday. On the plane." He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn't want things to get snarky this early in the.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c5fac63 | As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0004f98 | They'd never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake--which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 98f6420 | There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon filter, in other words, and the teahouse demon-free, which seemed of only limited usefulness if it still hosted people like Dr. X. But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be remi.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3207d2b | Much depended on how rapidly it would prove feasible to mass-produce inflatable structures; these made it possible to create much more spacious volumes by housing people in what amounted to thick-skinned balloons. But making balloons that could withstand atmospheric pressure indefinitely while also standing up to solar radiation, thermal swings, and micrometeoroids was no small project. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7d80faf | If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape--brightly illuminating a set of points--of cosmi--that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from t.. | Neal Stephenson |