Charles Stross quotes - page 3

And that's when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene. (Charles Stross)
Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us. View quote
Charles Stross
A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) View quote
Charles Stross
You have an evil mind!” "And this is a bad thing how, exactly? View quote
Charles Stross
You're like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he's no longer able to ignore his own disbelief.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. View quote
Charles Stross
People didn't always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions. View quote
Charles Stross
Time travel destabilizes history. History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly's wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order. View quote
Charles Stross
Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence. View quote
Charles Stross
A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can't go yet, he thought. It's not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless. View quote
Charles Stross
Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave. View quote
Charles Stross
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)
I think we may be mistaking the elephant's tail for a bell-pull. View quote
Charles Stross
I don't like their system, and they know it. That's why I'm sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But-” He shrugged. "Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don't like them as individuals, but that's not the same as wanting them dead. They're not monsters, and they don't deserve what's coming to them, and life isn't fair, is it? View quote
Charles Stross
They're too literal-minded,” he said quietly. "All doing, no innovative thinking. They don't understand metaphors well; half of them think you're Baba Yaga returned, you know? We've been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas. View quote
Charles Stross
She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way. View quote
Charles Stross
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. View quote
Charles Stross
Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it's got some momentum behind it. View quote
Charles Stross
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. View quote
Charles Stross
Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School. View quote
Charles Stross
Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition-his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. View quote
Charles Stross
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)
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. View quote
Charles Stross
Worlds with a single planetary government aren't meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It's some kind of natural law or something-world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun. View quote
Charles Stross
The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn't it? View quote
Charles Stross
Bad day at the office?” "It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place. View quote
Charles Stross