Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

Ideology is a virus.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.

any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

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.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.

He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

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.

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.

Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.

It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.

As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.

The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.

Jad said, The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters. Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.

If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic.