Quotes from Neal Stephenson

trying to get Dutch people to prepare for disasters was a little like trying to get English people to watch football on the telly or Americans to buy guns.

What's the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand.

I am an Aleut." "Oh, I've never heard of that." "That's because we've been fucked over," the big scary Aleut says, "worse than any other people in history.

Ever think of introducing yourself? Y.T. says. Nah, he says, people always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know?

It's just like the reviews promised—other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.

These simple terms—"come about," for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope.

He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.

I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.

A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world... Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

Many a ship's officer, caught in a storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew.

No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn't going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable.

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack's mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed.

When you just wing it, you are aware of the risk and the uncertainty, and inclined to be more cautious. When you have a high-tech tool giving you an illusion of omniscience, I am concerned that it will lead to greater risk-taking. LYONS:

Maybe that's what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can't—who shouldn't—share her problems with anyone else.

there was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years.

Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value -- seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does -- it is a shared phant'sy.

Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.

The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements.

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice, grumbled Newton.

Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes.