Quotes from Charles Stross

There isn't very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn't get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.

Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;

Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop.

Are you a psychiatrist?" "I don't think so." He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. "Then I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte!

the sacrificial repository at Arlington

It's as exhausting as dealing with an early-stage dementia sufferer—one with a trillion-pound budget and nuclear-weapons-release authority.

I'm not mad, you know, although it helps in this line of work.

You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.

We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, We invented sex! The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.

We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.

Hate the sin, love the sinner: it's hard to stay pissed off at someone for doing something wrong if you know you'd have done exactly the same thing if you'd been standing in their shoes.)

The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.

All right." Panin sips at his wine. "Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?" "What?" "You appear unduly upset ..." "Yes." She looks at her hands. "The missing officer is my husband." Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. "Is there anything I can do to help?" "Yes.

You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It's one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.

he looked like an escapee from a reeducation camp for fashion criminals.

For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we've assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar.

His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.

Lockhart twitches. "I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means." "What, the tendency of people—usually women—in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?" Lockhart inclines his head. "Point.

Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy.

Um. Oh dear." "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I don't know. Are you thinking, goats are kind of like sheep with bad attitude? I'm not a fucking chupacabra, man.

It's the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who'll help you out of it

This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To