“ As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation, the first MetaCop says. You stay cool and we'll st… Neal Stephenson
“ Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says su… Neal Stephenson
“ An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of g… Neal Stephenson
“ All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will,… Neal Stephenson
“ Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; Neal Stephenson
“ But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had… Neal Stephenson
“ ...Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value -- seigneurage. It h… Neal Stephenson
“ Think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. Neal Stephenson
“ There was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. Neal Stephenson
“ The usual academician’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. Neal Stephenson
“ Realizes that 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 und… Neal Stephenson
“ Nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. Elsewhere Neal Stephenson
“ Mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-… Neal Stephenson
“ It was connected, by an underground tunnel and secret passages on every floor, directly to the brewery itself—thus allowing johns who needed to remain anonymous a way to escape if the brothel were rai… Neal Stephenson
“ It might be true in the future. But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now. Neal Stephenson
“ In the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a na… Neal Stephenson
“ Confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every… Neal Stephenson
“ Atmosphere, but she connected them anyway, as well as a power cable. Then she reached back behind her, all the way down to Neal Stephenson
