“ Who is going to fight them off, Randy? I’m afraid you’re going to say we are. Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-wors… Neal Stephenson
“ When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave oven… Neal Stephenson
“ What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze? I was going to say the Penguin, Dinah said, but people in Seattle don’t carry umbrellas. Neal Stephenson
“ What is BFR? asked Pete Starling. For the graph’s vertical scale was labeled thus. Bolide Fragmentation Rate, Doob said. The rate at which new rocks are being produced. Is that a standard term? Pete w… 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 was that they could all… Neal Stephenson
“ What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus? Fraa Jad asked. He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge, I said. You think he saw beauty? That… Neal Stephenson
“ Well, ‘vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves’ is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe, Neal Stephenson
“ We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce Neal Stephenson
“ We know the economics of these startups, Eb says. We begin with nothing but the idea. That’s what the NDA is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower into it—and get s… Neal Stephenson
“ We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. Common as the air meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew… Neal Stephenson
“ We gotta come up with a plan, Shaftoe says. The plan: You live, I die, Goto Dengo says. Fuck that, Shaftoe says. Hey, don’t you idiots know you’re surrounded? We know, Goto Dengo says wearily. We know… Neal Stephenson
“ Virgil returned to the Operator’s Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code se… Neal Stephenson
“ Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under theright circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If Imoved to a martial-arts monastery in China and stu… Neal Stephenson
“ To be in a habitat—even a quite large and cosmopolitan one—when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenl… Neal Stephenson
“ To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude. Neal Stephenson
“ This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels… Neal Stephenson
“ Thinking is what angels do—it is a property given to Man by God. How do you suppose God gives it to us? I do not pretend to know, sir! If you take a man’s brain and distill him, can you extract a myst… Neal Stephenson
“ They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test sc… Neal Stephenson
“ Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had… Neal Stephenson
“ Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military. Neal Stephenson
