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Charles Stross
294 quotes
“The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?” “Got a problem.” “A big one?” “Female human-sized.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care. Unfortunately, they were mistaken.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Didn’t I have you executed last week?” “I very much doubt. It.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton? A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?” Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. “Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable; sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly. “No, sir.” “Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have a problem, sir.” “What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems—that’s the enemy’s job!”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time travel destabilizes history. History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately, it appeared that she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Will you stop calling me a child!” Rachel hunched around in her chair and stared at him. “But you are, you know. Even if you were sixty years old, you’d still be a child to me. As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you’re a child. You could fuck your way through every brothel in New Prague, and you’d still be an overgrown schoolboy.” She looked at him sadly. “What would you call a parent who never let their children grow up? That’s what we think of your government.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You got overdraft at the mythology bank.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe—shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It’s all over! Except it also felt like...like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa’s ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity)—and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It’s about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is.” A wan smile crept across her face. “Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?” “Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death—with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights—will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source