Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places

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. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.

Show some fucking adaptability!

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.

Boredom is a mask frustration wears.

Did you win your sword fight?" "Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world." "And you wrote the software." "Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.

I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.