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Charles Stross
294 quotes
“Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods. “What was it like then?” “What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “I’m not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can I remember— “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bad day at the office?” “It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have an evil mind!” “And this is a bad thing how, exactly?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into the cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?” She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The number one crime in any age: offending the money.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that? Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truly the jaws of irony are agape!”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source