Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”

— Charles Stross

52. “Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention.”

— Charles Stross

53. “Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.”

— Charles Stross

54. “America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. – Woodrow Wilson, 1919.”

— Charles Stross

55. “Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.”

— Charles Stross

56. “I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.”

— Charles Stross

57. “Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.”

— Charles Stross

58. “But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.”

— Charles Stross

59. “Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”

— Charles Stross

60. “I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.”

— Charles Stross

61. “And because my employers agree with me, and they’re the government, you’re outvoted.”

— Charles Stross

62. “Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.”

— Charles Stross

63. “I’m not planning a kickstarter game. And I’m not really a game designer.”

— Charles Stross

64. “Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”

— Charles Stross

65. “Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms – because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.”

— Charles Stross

66. “Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.”

— Charles Stross

67. “Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

— Charles Stross

68. “The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.”

— Charles Stross

69. “His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”

— Charles Stross

70. “Georgina darts forward, grabs my hand, and pumps it up and down while peering at my face as if she’s wondering why water isn’t gushing from my mouth.”

— Charles Stross

71. “Yes, Derek,” I tell him, “we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?”

— Charles Stross

72. “You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.”

— Charles Stross

73. “The vampire has just realized she’s in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night.”

— Charles Stross

74. “That looks nasty, I hope you’ve got a change of clothes back at the office. I guess now we know why real superheroes wear artificial fibers.”

— Charles Stross

75. “History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one – their accuracy and authenticity – is a function of the reliability of the narrator.”

— Charles Stross

76. “I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.”

— Charles Stross

77. “Lockhart twitches. “I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means.” “What, the tendency of people – usually women – in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?” Lockhart inclines his head. “Point.”

— Charles Stross

78. “Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds – and then taking their mess right on the chin.”

— Charles Stross

79. “The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the “piracy” problem is massively over-rated.”

— Charles Stross

80. “There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made of a chromed baby’s skull.”

— Charles Stross

81. “There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon and you aren’t even carrying a cigarette lighter.”

— Charles Stross

82. “Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she’s late? It doesn’t normally take her this long to terminate an employee.”

— Charles Stross

83. “People want to buy mp3s but can’t? Piracy ensues. Then Apple strong-arms the music studios into the iTunes store and music piracy drops somewhat. The same, I believe, is also happening with ebooks.”

— Charles Stross

84. “It’s a bit like cricket,” Pete agrees. “Weeks of endless boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of existential terror.”

— Charles Stross

85. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.”

— Charles Stross

86. “There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if.”

— Charles Stross

87. “I’m told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.”

— Charles Stross

88. “And now my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting creative.”

— Charles Stross

89. “As far as my fellow students go, I’m one of the two dangerous rebels who turned up in office casual; the rest are so desperately sober that if you could bottle them you could put the Betty Ford Clinic out of business.”

— Charles Stross

90. “I’d like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.”

— Charles Stross

91. “An important factor to note is that it’s rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!”

— Charles Stross

92. “It’s as exhausting as dealing with an early-stage dementia sufferer – one with a trillion-pound budget and nuclear-weapons-release authority.”

— Charles Stross

93. “If I wanted to be in movies, I’d have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!”

— Charles Stross

94. “Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right.”

— Charles Stross

95. “There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it’s not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.”

— Charles Stross

96. “Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life.”

— Charles Stross

97. “Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.”

— Charles Stross

98. “There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.”

— Charles Stross

99. “There are things out there in the night where light cannot exist that make Cthulhu look like a Care Bear.”

— Charles Stross

100. “They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.”

— Charles Stross