Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone’s half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you’re sunk.”

— Neal Stephenson

302. “It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.”

— Neal Stephenson

303. “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

304. “Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d In vision beatific; by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. – MILTON, Paradise Lost.”

— Neal Stephenson

305. “Gomer Bolstrood.”

— Neal Stephenson

306. “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

307. “The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.”

— Neal Stephenson

308. “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

309. “At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in most cases doing so rather strongly, leading to a pandemonium of fainting, screaming, knife waving, malicious glaring, furious remonstration, hand-clapping delight, dismay, judicious beard stroking, etc. to say nothing of secondary interactions, as when a knife waver collided with a screamer.”

— Neal Stephenson

310. “People who like math. So I was trying to imagine – ” “When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?” “Yes.”

— Neal Stephenson

311. “He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man.”

— Neal Stephenson

312. “I was going to kill that doctor when he shoved his finger up my ass but then I realized the possibilities of that substance.”

— Neal Stephenson

313. “Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people’s lives even if they didn’t understand why.”

— Neal Stephenson

314. “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.”

— Neal Stephenson

315. “Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that’s closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it’s obvious at a glance who’s on the ball in this office and who is – as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms – having problems.”

— Neal Stephenson

316. “Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.”

— Neal Stephenson

317. “Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine.”

— Neal Stephenson

318. “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.”

— Neal Stephenson

319. “For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging.”

— Neal Stephenson

320. “Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.”

— Neal Stephenson

321. “Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie” – which doesn’t include you, Julia – “will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint.”

— Neal Stephenson

322. “A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners.”

— Neal Stephenson

323. “And yet people went on thinking this way, kind of in the way that someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness will go on getting up and going to work every morning, not so much out of habit as because the knowledge of impending doom makes them wish to assert an identity.”

— Neal Stephenson

324. “The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.”

— Neal Stephenson

325. “My son, in the eyes of Heaven, we are all as little children. No one of us is more important than another. In fact, the more important we think we are, the less we stand out in the eyes of the Lord.”

— Neal Stephenson

326. “Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.”

— Neal Stephenson

327. “She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed – not a polite ‘atchoo’ but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action.”

— Neal Stephenson

328. “Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft’s state-of-the-art hellhounds.”

— Neal Stephenson

329. “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

330. “Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together – that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.”

— Neal Stephenson

331. “In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”

— Neal Stephenson

332. “In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient.”

— Neal Stephenson

333. “All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.”

— Neal Stephenson

334. “But the television news cameras couldn’t get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.”

— Neal Stephenson

335. “Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to “commit suicide” in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!”

— Neal Stephenson

336. “Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.”

— Neal Stephenson

337. “Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.”

— Neal Stephenson

338. “Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder’s torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.”

— Neal Stephenson

339. “Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.”

— Neal Stephenson

340. “Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors.”

— Neal Stephenson

341. “That sounds like bulshytt!”

— Neal Stephenson

342. “Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of an overgrown graveyard.”

— Neal Stephenson

343. “Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.”

— Neal Stephenson

344. “Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood.”

— Neal Stephenson

345. “Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.”

— Neal Stephenson

346. “This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form.”

— Neal Stephenson

347. “Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle’s head.”

— Neal Stephenson

348. “And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and out labia and inner labia... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.”

— Neal Stephenson

349. “If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.”

— Neal Stephenson

350. “Magical?” “Non.” “Magnificent?” “Don’t be absurd.” “Less bleak than anything else we have seen?” “Now truly you are speaking French,” the ambassador said approvingly.”

— Neal Stephenson