Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

353. “It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.”

— Neal Stephenson

354. “The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however – for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”

— Neal Stephenson

355. “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

356. “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

357. “That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?” “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

— Neal Stephenson

358. “Y’know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

360. “Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers.”

— Neal Stephenson

361. “Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.”

— Neal Stephenson

362. “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

363. “A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science.”

— Neal Stephenson

364. “It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.” “You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.”

— Neal Stephenson

365. “He was forty-seven years old but in dim light could have passed for thirty.”

— Neal Stephenson

366. “All of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west.”

— Neal Stephenson

367. “Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.”

— Neal Stephenson

368. “Maybe that’s what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can’t – who shouldn’t – share her problems with anyone else.”

— Neal Stephenson

369. “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

370. “Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.”

— Neal Stephenson

371. “I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?”

— Neal Stephenson

372. “It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.”

— Neal Stephenson

373. “The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.”

— Neal Stephenson

374. “One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.”

— Neal Stephenson

375. “Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.”

— Neal Stephenson

376. “Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?”

— Neal Stephenson

377. “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

378. “Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor.”

— Neal Stephenson

379. “How could a man become a god?” Nell asked. “By living in an extremely pragmatic society,” said Constable Moore after some thought.”

— Neal Stephenson

380. “The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.”

— Neal Stephenson

381. “GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.”

— Neal Stephenson

382. “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

383. “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

384. “It wasn’t only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, “Gosh, a wheel, no one’s ever thought of that before,” just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done.”

— Neal Stephenson

385. “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

386. “Never been here before. It’s like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they’ve blundered into the mega-jackpot. It’s got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.”

— Neal Stephenson

387. “As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.”

— Neal Stephenson

388. “He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they’re scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.”

— Neal Stephenson

389. “An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

— Neal Stephenson

390. “The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.”

— Neal Stephenson

391. “No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.”

— Neal Stephenson

392. “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

393. “Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.”

— Neal Stephenson

394. “As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs.”

— Neal Stephenson

395. “We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.”

— Neal Stephenson

396. “Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right.”

— Neal Stephenson

397. “The tragedy – and the entire point – of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.”

— Neal Stephenson

398. “Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.”

— Neal Stephenson

399. “For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn’t even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family.”

— Neal Stephenson

400. “Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah’s preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri.”

— Neal Stephenson