Best Quotes by Neal Stephenson (Top 10)
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See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Neal Stephenson
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To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
Neal Stephenson
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Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
Neal Stephenson
More Neal Stephenson Quotes
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
Neal Stephenson
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Gold is the corpse of value...
Neal Stephenson
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And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Neal Stephenson
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... you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ...
Neal Stephenson
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But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation.
Neal Stephenson
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Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson