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Charles Stross
294 quotes
“The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American mainstream news media have so far steered well clear of the subject because the phenomenon has been enthusiastically embraced by the talk radio fringe, leading to a death spiral of diminishing credibility.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m disappointed in you, Mo: How could you imagine that the militarization of the police might be seen as a huge potential growth market by defense contractors?” “How indeed.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The HomeSec’s focus group will take one look at this and tell you to sex it up.”... “Why do you think that’ll be a priority?” she asks. “You know perfectly well why—...For the same reason they want a balanced team rather than a competent one. It doesn’t fit the cultural agenda they’re trying to impose.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is the weather always like this?” “It could be worse. They could be looking at relocating to Manchester, where the locals are evolving webbed fingers and gill slits.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We, the structures we collectively refer to as “life,” are patterns of information—temporary reversals of the arrow of entropy within our universe—and conscious minds are the most concentrated such patterns we know of.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?” Alex asks, rising. “Something like that. But there’s a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die. To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fog bank of the uncertain future.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her heart pounds. Dating, with its conventions of multiple social encounters as a prelude to fucking, seems absurdly complex to her, like cooking your own food rather than having servants and poison-testers prepare it for you.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She has only warped second-hand memories of motion pictures, none of them her own. It seems like a fantastically unproductive use of her time with Alex, staring vacantly at an elaborate visual lie.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Y2K was a real end-of-civilization problem. And the people who could deal with it treated it as such, working flat-out on disaster management for the last year-long countdown. With the result that the end-of-the-world scenario didn’t happen…causing everyone not directly involved to conclude that it was a false alarm.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re from the Ministry of Defense: our sense of humor is surgically excised at birth.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What happens if we don’t do this?” “I don’t know. Probably we don’t die. I mean, maybe probably. Possibly maybe probably.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fracking for oil in the basement.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ grinder a memo.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But all these mitigating techniques have severe drawbacks, and as a result there are old ritual magicians, and there are bold ritual magicians, but there are no old, bold magicians. They don’t survive, and they tend to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principle of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The iron law of bureaucracy doesn’t help: everybody working to ensure that the organization continues to pay them a salary, rather than necessarily achieving its objectives.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Governments are machines for producing and implementing legal frameworks.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies:”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, Bob,” she says tiredly, “mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there’ll be an argument, and it’ll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t understand exactly what she thinks we need to talk about, but maybe that’s half the problem.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t get enough practice at killing people to not feel bad about it; I hope I never do, although that’s looking like a forlorn wish these days.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hate guns. I can use them, but I don’t like being around them; they add this terrible random-act-of-no-god-at-all angle to any fight. Bang, you’re dead, even if you weren’t the person the shooter was aiming for, even if it’s an accidental discharge.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, incoming fire has right of way, as they say.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve finally done it, I’ve broken something that shouldn’t have been broken, and I’m really not sure who the monsters are anymore.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s found a teapot and milk and is brewing up, because that’s what the English do when they’ve just broken out of military prison one jump ahead of murderous assassins from an alien death god cult, then survived being shot at by a main battle tank.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mhari consults her conscience and takes another step into the twilight borderland between bending the rules and breaking them.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s the sort of Maxwell Smart hack that used to cost the CIA black budget half a billion to develop in the ’60s but is off-the-shelf from a Chinese toy factory these days.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lord Acton said power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Venous blood isn’t really blue. In lipstick terms it’s dark plum, not crimson gloss.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The British ruling class was never noted for its expertise in haut cuisine. Rumors that they conquered a quarter of the planet in search of a decent meal cannot be discounted.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or second chances.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shopping is the true religion of Middle America, and this Walmart is the most eclectic of mega-churches, perpetually understaffed and a bit unkempt, with stock flowing off the shelves and piles of stripped packaging forming cardboard snow drifts in corners.”
Charles Stross (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source