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Charles Stross
294 quotes
“On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising. This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is the one thing money can’t buy.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What price an immortal soul, when booty beckons?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ninety-eight percent of management work in this organization is routine. The other two percent is a tightrope walk over an erupting volcano without a safety net. Congratulations: here’s your balance pole.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What about religion?” “Religion is power, to these people. And power is religion, of course. If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? The real believers are running soup kitchens and emptying bedpans, trying to do good while the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel are doing it to keep up the payments on the McMansion and the Roller.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What if he is a true believer, have you thought about that?” “A true believer in what? The prosperity gospel? New Republican Jesus who rewards his faithful flock for their faith with the ability to make money fast? That’s self-serving cant, and you know it. Wish-fulfillment as religion.” A twitch of the cheek: Persephone unamused. “Don’t get me started on the gap between the Vatican and their flock.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re trying to summon up the elder gods.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by jet lag.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m stranded in limbo, otherwise known as downtown Denver.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes people do good things for bad reasons, and sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. He isn’t sure which this is yet, but he’s hoping for the former.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.” “But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was hoping you might be able to help me with a question of character.” “Character.” Angleton doesn’t seem at all put out by Lockhart’s refusal; he leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “There’s a word I don’t hear often enough these days. Especially coming from you.” “Of course not.” Lockhart is dismissive. “It’s a subjective value judgment and those don’t sit comfortably with ticky-boxes and objective performance metrics.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do something I never do in hotel rooms, which is to pick up the TV remote for a purpose other than hammering the “off” button.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.” “Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?” “I can think of several.” I cross my legs. “Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source