By outward appearances, Cantabrigia Five was a video journalist. But it made sense that, in a world where no police or military action could be judged successful unless it looked good to ordinary persons watching it on video screens, she was also a general.

— Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson Quotes

Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.

— Neal Stephenson

So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium.

— Neal Stephenson

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.

— Neal Stephenson

She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: “No.

— Neal Stephenson

It’s as though anyone who argues clearly can’t be trusted – that’s the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I’m just at a loss to understand. I can’t talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I’ll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can’t support any position, only the right position. If it’s not right, the words won’t make it so. That’s the value of clear language.” This.

— Neal Stephenson

Among geeks, the cool-soundingness of the acronym is more important than the existence of what it refers to.

— Neal Stephenson

Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting,” Waterhouse says loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. “I myself studied with Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.” Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he’s just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he’s about to go down in flames.

— Neal Stephenson

Is it Protestant money or Catholic money you’re after?” I ask. “It does not matter,” he says. “Not where I come from.” “Where in God’s name do you come from?” I ask again. “May I go there with you? Because in the name of Our Lord’s mammy, if I could be someplace where money’s got no religion and religion’s got no money, I’d be a happier woman.

— Neal Stephenson

If Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use and like, then it really will be time to dump their stock, because I am a market segment of one.

— Neal Stephenson

Get the bicycles.

— Neal Stephenson

There was an odd bending around in back at the extreme limits of culture and politics where back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 99 percent of their lives doing the same stuff.

— Neal Stephenson

It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.

— Neal Stephenson

Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

— Neal Stephenson

The next morning the Fellowship, now filled out to a Tolkien-compliant head count of nine, simply walked.

— Neal Stephenson

You spend too much time goggled in,” she says. “Try a little Reality, man.

— Neal Stephenson

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I been holed up in this place long enough.

— Neal Stephenson

In the distant past, kings had shown the world that they meant it by strapping on a sword and riding into war, putting their lives on the line. Getting behind the controls of a plane and pointing it at a runway was as close as one could reasonably come in the modern world to the same public blood oath.

— Neal Stephenson

The landscape of the suburban night has much weird beauty if you just look.

— Neal Stephenson

The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life – the deep structures – so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner’s analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.

— Neal Stephenson

All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places they had long since discovered. Thrashers and nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives thrive in the same environment.

— Neal Stephenson
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