Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Neal Stephenson
131 quotes
“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wired 2.02: In the Kingdom of Mao Bell. February 1994
“I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Neal Stephenson coins the term "text literacy" during interview for the article "Pushing the Edge With 'Diamond Age' Nano-Machines," Associated Press, May 10, 1995
“The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Conversation With Neal Stephenson. SF Site interview with Catherine Asaro, September 1999.
“I can never get past the structural similarities between the Singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. The key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind...[loosely paraphrasing Jaron Lanier] while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit. And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Slashdot interview, 2004, reprinted in Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing, 2012.
“I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Neal Stephenson's Past, Present, and Future". Reason magazine interview by Mike Godwin, February 2005
“As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In response to whether Anathem "reflects today's culture or politics," from an interview published Sept. 22, 2008 by MIT News
“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, Fall 2011
“I wanted to create an interesting scifi universe that didn't violate the laws of physics, and that means that you're limited to staying inside the solar system. I also wanted to get away from the ship-centric style of science fiction. Star Trek is ship-centric and it's all about the Enterprise — there are many other examples. What if we decided to get away from the obsession with ships and instead thought about big machines and structures that might be used to create a civilization inside the solar system?”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About Seveneves, "Here's How Space Megastructures Will Look, According to Neal Stephenson" in Gizmodo, interviewed by Annalee Newitz, May 20, 2015 (pre-Zero)
“Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times .... Boston University, where I did my Master's ... most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. ... I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have ... and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.” “So?” “Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed.... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land there's the Omni, but all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking.... Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals....there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventative measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every large corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture." "I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that." "Well, I wouldn't say it in public.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material—they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.” “Isn’t that the whole point of heavy metal?” “Yeah. I’m the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you’re an engineer, and you’re not very bright, it’s easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth and I nodded back.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those guys are troglodytes,” he said, “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent,” he confessed. “Because then you’re the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good yuppie has no sense of smell.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists...Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. William Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the hacker, the most interesting thing about the pyramids is their business plan, which is the simplest and most effective ever devised: 1. Put a rock on top of another rock. 2. Repeat (1) until gawkers arrive. 3. Separate them from their valuables by all conceivable means.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensable.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon's equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evening went fine. Doob, who had raised three children to adulthood, had figured out a long time ago that any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dinah,” Sparky said, “you’re indispensable.” She knew exactly what this meant, in meeting-speak: they would put her out the airlock if they could.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger."...He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source