“ All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy l… Neal Stephenson
“ Many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks: 1)… Neal Stephenson
“ You’re British, you’re a priest, you’re a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you’re a fucking pain in the ass – so off you go! Neal Stephenson
“ Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information bein… Neal Stephenson
“ When you say ‘plugged it in,’ could you please tell me everything you plugged into it? Peter had now dropped, improbably, into a polite, clinical mode, like a customer service rep in a Bangalore cubic… Neal Stephenson
“ What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could al… Neal Stephenson
“ What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone wh… Neal Stephenson
“ Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and o… Neal Stephenson
“ The uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tend… Neal Stephenson
“ The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements. Neal Stephenson
“ The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality: Neal Stephenson
“ The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this since he had heard that Google Earth in turn was based on an idea fro… Neal Stephenson
“ The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality […] Neal Stephenson
“ The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. Neal Stephenson
“ The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been tho… Neal Stephenson
“ The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable cred… Neal Stephenson
“ The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer. Neal Stephenson
“ That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies t… Neal Stephenson
