Neal Stephenson Quotes

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.

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

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

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

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

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.

Gold is the corpse of value.

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

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

Boredom is a mask frustration wears.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

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.

It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.

Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.

One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

The only thing that can effect a big change in personality is something that physically rewires the brain and/or alters the body's chemical milieu.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

It is the fate of operating systems to become free.

I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

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

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it."

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

Two tires fly. Two Wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs.

Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

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

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

You don't want your readers seeing easy connections; it becomes a distraction.

She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave

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

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea.

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?