Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we’re really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.”

— Neal Stephenson

52. “It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it’s all can openers.”

— Neal Stephenson

53. “The hour of noon has passed,′ said Judge Fang. ‘Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

— Neal Stephenson

54. “Any property that’s open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.”

— Neal Stephenson

55. “The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.”

— Neal Stephenson

56. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible – states of affairs removed from them in space and time – ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.”

— Neal Stephenson

57. “Gold is the corpse of value...”

— Neal Stephenson

58. “You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn.”

— Neal Stephenson

59. “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

— Neal Stephenson

60. “Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations – whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes – without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.”

— Neal Stephenson

61. “One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I’ve lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.”

— Neal Stephenson

62. “Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child’s life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.”

— Neal Stephenson

63. “As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.”

— Neal Stephenson

64. “Native Americans had tricksters – creatures full of cunning – like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.”

— Neal Stephenson

65. “The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.”

— Neal Stephenson

66. “Two tires fly. Two Wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs.”

— Neal Stephenson

67. “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

68. “Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it. – Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS.”

— Neal Stephenson

69. “So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium.”

— Neal Stephenson

70. “Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power.”

— Neal Stephenson

71. “Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas “Fscking” Edison.”

— Neal Stephenson

72. “Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn’t that at all. She was like Ivy’s grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise.”

— Neal Stephenson

73. “In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.’ ” Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. “In Connaught,” he added. “In Connaught,” Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch.”

— Neal Stephenson

74. “The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”

— Neal Stephenson

75. “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

76. “Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”

— Neal Stephenson

77. “There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily.” – Alan Turing.”

— Neal Stephenson

78. “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

79. “My men think you are dead now, and won’t waste balls on you,” Jack said. “In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!”

— Neal Stephenson

80. “She’s not afraid. She’s wearing a dentata.”

— Neal Stephenson

81. “Reality is what we make it. Or what is made for us by the companies we keep. It is our clay from which we fashion ourselves.”

— Neal Stephenson

82. “We see everything from the narrator’s point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he’s telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.”

— Neal Stephenson

83. “I just assume I’m not invisible. I assume I’m wearing fluorescent clothes, and there’s a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.”

— Neal Stephenson

84. “Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read.”

— Neal Stephenson

85. “We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. – DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce.”

— Neal Stephenson

86. “Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.”

— Neal Stephenson

87. “The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2 – 216 power to be exact – and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that’s how many digits a computer can recognize.”

— Neal Stephenson

88. “She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave.”

— Neal Stephenson

89. “What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”

— Neal Stephenson

90. “What’s an adventure?” Nell said. The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with.”

— Neal Stephenson

91. “For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. – HOBBES, Leviathan.”

— Neal Stephenson

92. “Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?”

— Neal Stephenson

93. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

94. “Reptiles are just retarded birds,” said the King of the Birds, “and so I am your King, thank you very much.”

— Neal Stephenson

95. “Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?”

— Neal Stephenson

96. “This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.”

— Neal Stephenson

97. “Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”

— Neal Stephenson

98. “The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.”

— Neal Stephenson

99. “There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns – all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.”

— Neal Stephenson

100. “Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank – a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.”

— Neal Stephenson