The implied responsibility placed upon the officer’s shoulders by the subordinate’s unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

— Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson Quotes

Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.” “Why?” Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.” Marlon smiled. “Ah.

— Neal Stephenson

As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.

— Neal Stephenson

Disaster’ is an astrological term meaning ’bad star.

— Neal Stephenson

The stars’ positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy.

— Neal Stephenson

People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs.

— Neal Stephenson

Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military.

— Neal Stephenson

Linguistics got me into this excellent mess––only physics can get me out.

— Neal Stephenson

Questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin.

— Neal Stephenson

But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him – people who had better things they could have been doing – devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans.

— Neal Stephenson

The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.

— Neal Stephenson

John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch chain.

— Neal Stephenson

Information contains an almost mystical power of free flow and self replication, just as water seeks it’s own level or sparks fly upward.

— Neal Stephenson

Gomer Bolstrood.

— Neal Stephenson

What is a game but a drill that’s dressed up in colorful clothing?” Dojo said.

— Neal Stephenson

All the Chinese people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was.

— Neal Stephenson

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
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