Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Who knows? It’s a long shot, but it just might work.”

— Charles Stross

2. “There is good management and bad management: good management is like air – you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.”

— Charles Stross

3. “We are, after all, homo economicus.”

— Charles Stross

4. “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

5. “You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.”

— Charles Stross

6. “Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?”

— Charles Stross

7. “Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!”

— Charles Stross

8. “I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I’m just a slow learner .”

— Charles Stross

9. “As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him; in.”

— Charles Stross

10. “Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like “memory leak” and “debugger.”

— Charles Stross

11. “Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.”

— Charles Stross

12. “Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you’ll soon figure out why – written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.”

— Charles Stross

13. “Although now that I’m in middle management I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”

— Charles Stross

14. “Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it’s being unoriginal.”

— Charles Stross

15. “There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.”

— Charles Stross

16. “Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”

— Charles Stross

17. “Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them “librarians”.”

— Charles Stross

18. “Superman, Iron Man, Batman” – Flyaway Hair winces visibly – “you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.”

— Charles Stross

19. “Down in the park with a friend called Five.”

— Charles Stross

20. “I don’t have a license to kill, but I don’t have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;.”

— Charles Stross

21. “All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.”

— Charles Stross

22. “Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.”

— Charles Stross

23. “If I was a Marxist I’d call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I’m not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we’re seeing...”

— Charles Stross

24. “I’ve reached an age at which I’d rather pay more for something that “just works” than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we’ve got left.”

— Charles Stross

25. “Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?””

— Charles Stross

26. “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

27. “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

28. “First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life – oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.”

— Charles Stross

29. “I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.”

— Charles Stross

30. “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

31. “I do not click on random youtube videos.”

— Charles Stross

32. “I’m a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.”

— Charles Stross

33. “Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.”

— Charles Stross

34. “The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.”

— Charles Stross

35. “The Magician’s Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.”

— Charles Stross

36. “I don’t do flash fiction.”

— Charles Stross

37. “A young filly is leading her mater in. They’re both wearing green wellies, and there’s something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series.”

— Charles Stross

38. “I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.”

— Charles Stross

39. “You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”

— Charles Stross

40. “Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You’re the expert in Visio, aren’t you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while.”

— Charles Stross

41. “Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.”

— Charles Stross

42. “My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.”

— Charles Stross

43. “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

44. “Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.”

— Charles Stross

45. “We shouldn’t even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we’re management, not heroes.”

— Charles Stross

46. “Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”

— Charles Stross

47. “I’m not mad, you know, although it helps in this line of work.”

— Charles Stross

48. “Are they by any chance a quiverfull ministry?” Pete’s lips thin. “Yes.” The word “quiverfull” sets my alarm bells ringing, and clearly upsets Mo. It goes back to Psalm 127, which refers to having many children as having a full quiver. They’re arrows for the Lord, and a number of evangelical churches have adopted the theory that you can never have too much ammunition.”

— Charles Stross

49. “Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?”

— Charles Stross

50. “Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it’s semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty.”

— Charles Stross