Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

356. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

362. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

366. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “People are my books,” Ty said. “But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.”

— Neal Stephenson

373. “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

374. “So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

376. “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

377. “To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.”

— Neal Stephenson

378. “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

379. “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

380. “The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong.”

— Neal Stephenson

381. “I doubt you even know what duty is,” she retorted. A risky response – such flippancy of the tongue – and it might provoke them, but showing fear would invite a response. Half of combat is causing your opponent to think you are stronger than you are, Gansukh had told her. Scarface.”

— Neal Stephenson

382. “The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue – records that tell a consistent story.”

— Neal Stephenson

383. “It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.”

— Neal Stephenson

384. “Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo.”

— Neal Stephenson

385. “They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman’s March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.”

— Neal Stephenson

386. “Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox.”

— Neal Stephenson

387. “Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag.”

— Neal Stephenson

388. “An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.”

— Neal Stephenson

389. “I know,” Julia said. “It is so difficult rebuilding an intelligence community from scratch. One must make do with the materials at hand. Their youth, their inexperience, and the openness they’ve come to expect from living their whole lives on the Internet – all are inimical to doing things as they ought to be done. That is why we need more experienced hands – people who have learned the right instincts.”

— Neal Stephenson

390. “Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.”

— Neal Stephenson

391. “The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.”

— Neal Stephenson

392. “It became sort of obvious that one of them was the boss. Tall guy, a little older than the others, in a Manu jersey.” “Manu jersey?” “Manu Ginobili,” Peter said, almost angry that Zula did not understand the reference. “He plays for the Spurs.”

— Neal Stephenson

393. “When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.”

— Neal Stephenson

394. “There was silence around the big table in the Banana.”

— Neal Stephenson

395. “Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. “As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly – causing them to jump out of windows – weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye.”

— Neal Stephenson

396. “It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.”

— Neal Stephenson

397. “It wasn’t just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A.”

— Neal Stephenson

398. “The modern world’s hell on haiku writers: “Electrical generator” is, what, eight syllables? You couldn’t even fit that onto the second line!”

— Neal Stephenson

399. “Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses – viruses generated from within itself.”

— Neal Stephenson

400. “I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.”

— Neal Stephenson