Quotes from Neal Stephenson

How America was Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK

Topology is destiny

You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk

the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

All change happens because one man wants something different.

As they came out of a stand of big oaks and maples and broke out into windswept prairie near the brow of the hill, she saw the truth, which was that people had actually been nailed to those crosses and left to die.

The question, as always, is whether the organizing principle is added to the gross matter to animate it, as yeast is thrown into beer, or inheres in the relationships among the parts themselves.

Your ass is busted," the second MetaCop says. "As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation," the first MetaCop says. "You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says.

By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this subject. The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage—not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next.

War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worth while

The fringe crowd looks pretty typical for the wrong side of an L.A. overpass in the middle of the night.

For the stuff of which we are made is just the common stuff of the world, viz. ordinary gross matter, so that a materialist might say, we are no different from rocks; and yet our matter is imbued with some organizing principle that endows us with identities, so that I may send a letter to Daniel Waterhouse in London in the full confidence that, like a smoke-ring traversing a battle-field, he has traveled a great distance, and persisted for a long time, and yet is still the same man.

Randall Lawrence Waterhouse hates Star Trek and avoids people who don't hate it, but even so he has seen just about every episode of the damn thing, and he feels, at this moment, like the Federation scientist who beams down to a primitive planet and thoughtlessly teaches an opportunistic pre-Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from commonly available materials.

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this.

But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks.

Hamlet's a dull fuck of a story where a fellow stands around lamenting how useless he is even to his own self, and then there's one pansy swordfight and it's over. The only good part of that is what he nicked from Kit's Dido.

I've never heard of Manu Ginobili," Zula said. "Is he really such a common cultural referent that—" "Yes," said Peter and Csongor in unison.

The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown.

The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications. First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and, finally, extreme pragmatism.

For the London in which he had grown up had been a congeries of estates, parks, and compounds

The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.

ultima ratio regum mean?" " 'The Last Argument of Kings

If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math.