“ The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold. (Enoch in… Neal Stephenson
“ We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were v… Neal Stephenson
“ [Enoch Root] hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included—with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like… Neal Stephenson
“ He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles up… Neal Stephenson
“ The mysterious Enoch Root meets 8-year-old Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 1713: Do I look like a schoolmaster to you? No, but you talk like one. You know something of schoolmasters, do you?Yes, sir, the b… Neal Stephenson
“ Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about… Neal Stephenson
“ [The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only… Neal Stephenson
“ The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves. Neal Stephenson
“ El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la característica de lograr que los treintañeros se sientan decrépitos Neal Stephenson
“ A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbit… Neal Stephenson
“ Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. Neal Stephenson
“ 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 s… Neal Stephenson
“ This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. Neal Stephenson
“ The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in oneplace will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulentbusiness plan, condense it into a three-ring binde… Neal Stephenson
“ Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney.What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things… Neal Stephenson
“ Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. Neal Stephenson
“ Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition… Neal Stephenson
“ Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already t… Neal Stephenson
