Charles Stross quotes

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen-it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry. (Charles Stross)
Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
Charles Stross
The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'
Charles Stross
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
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
Charles Stross
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
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
Charles Stross
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
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
Charles Stross
Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe? (Charles Stross)
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
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
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
Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
Charles Stross
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
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
Charles Stross
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
Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.
Charles Stross
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
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)
I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.
Charles Stross
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
Didn't I have you executed last week?” "I very much doubt. It.
Charles Stross
Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?” "Got a problem.” "A big one?” "Female human-sized.
Charles Stross