Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.”

— Neal Stephenson

152. “He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.”

— Neal Stephenson

153. “I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.”

— Neal Stephenson

154. “Even though we didn’t say anything, we were in dialog: a peregrin dialog, meaning two equals wandering around trying to work something out, as opposed to a suvinian dialog where a fid is being taught by a mentor, or a Periklynian dialog, which is combat.”

— Neal Stephenson

155. “Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?”

— Neal Stephenson

156. “Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties.”

— Neal Stephenson

157. “I don’t even know how to describe it. ‘Ragtag’ makes it sound like more than it is.”

— Neal Stephenson

158. “Jad said, “The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters.” Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.”

— Neal Stephenson

159. “What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus?” Fraa Jad asked. “He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge,” I said. “You think he saw beauty? That is a safe answer, since it is beautiful. But what was he thinking about? What connections did the beauty enable him to perceive?” “I couldn’t possibly answer that.” “Don’t answer it. Ask it.”

— Neal Stephenson

160. “The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.”

— Neal Stephenson

161. “My lady,” Percival began. He had called her that yesterday, and she had guessed it was some kind of elaborate sarcasm. But this didn’t seem like the time for unpleasant jibes. Maybe it was just the way he’d been raised. Cnan wished she could meet Percival’s mother. “I cannot recommend that you remain in that position,” he said, “considering that hostile archers, in large numbers, are about to surround you.”

— Neal Stephenson

162. “Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.”

— Neal Stephenson

163. “If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy.”

— Neal Stephenson

164. “Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.”

— Neal Stephenson

165. “In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.”

— Neal Stephenson

166. “I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago,” Avi says. “They have plastic forests there!” “What does that mean?” “Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can’t get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.”

— Neal Stephenson

167. “Parking lots and chaos.”

— Neal Stephenson

168. “But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.”

— Neal Stephenson

169. “The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them.”

— Neal Stephenson

170. “But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost – swallowed up in the ocean – unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.”

— Neal Stephenson

171. “For members of the general public might not care about Wolf-Rayet stars in the Quintuplet Cluster, but they definitely saw why having hot rocks fall on one’s head was a good thing to avoid.”

— Neal Stephenson

172. “The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar.”

— Neal Stephenson

173. “Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

— Neal Stephenson

174. “You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts.”

— Neal Stephenson

175. “RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Seven and you won’t have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.”

— Neal Stephenson

176. “The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead.”

— Neal Stephenson

177. “The moon had broken up into seven large pieces, which inevitably became known as the Seven Sisters, and an uncountable number of smaller ones. Gradually the big ones acquired names. Doc Dubois was responsible for many of these. 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

178. “I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.”

— Neal Stephenson

179. “The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.”

— Neal Stephenson

180. “I’m strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I’d probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea.”

— Neal Stephenson

181. “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

182. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.”

— Neal Stephenson

183. “The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.”

— Neal Stephenson

184. “Many set themselves the aim of rescuing the indifferent and the lazy – and end up lost themselves. The flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. –.”

— Neal Stephenson

185. “If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah.”

— Neal Stephenson

186. “But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’ if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You’ve spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.”

— Neal Stephenson

187. “In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions.”

— Neal Stephenson

188. “Reader, if you don’t know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account.”

— Neal Stephenson

189. “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. They are not baffled by ambigous or even contradictory situations – in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”

— Neal Stephenson

190. “I hadn’t known that,′ I said. ‘I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.’ ‘There might as well be,’ Arsibalt said, ’but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs.”

— Neal Stephenson

191. “The problem with those honorable men,” Avi says, “is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.”

— Neal Stephenson

192. “I hate e-mail,” John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?” “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

— Neal Stephenson

193. “The commentary came from millions of idiots on the Internet.”

— Neal Stephenson

194. “All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days,” she said, deadpan.”

— Neal Stephenson

195. “Got what?” Pete Starling asked, over the video link. “Am I missing something?” “No,” Dinah said. “We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.”

— Neal Stephenson

196. “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

197. “Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Neal Stephenson

198. “I don’t like sewing machines. I don’t understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It’s contrary to nature and it irritates me.”

— Neal Stephenson

199. “All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.”

— Neal Stephenson

200. “His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.”

— Neal Stephenson