Charles Stross quotes - page 4

Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. (Charles Stross)
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms. View quote
Charles Stross
Perforce, the family that preys together stays together. View quote
Charles Stross
New Dresden is not a McWorld: it's a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say "past masters” for a reason-they're not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet. View quote
Charles Stross
As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies. View quote
Charles Stross
I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions. View quote
Charles Stross
In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them. View quote
Charles Stross
The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else. View quote
Charles Stross
You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It's one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith. View quote
Charles Stross
It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and-stripped of the ability to get drunk on it-wine was just sour grape juice. View quote
Charles Stross
Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance. (Charles Stross)
You know there's no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots-it doesn't teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously. View quote
Charles Stross
It's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't story-telling what being human is all about? View quote
Charles Stross
Er, I can't confirm or deny, but that's a good guess. View quote
Charles Stross
Human consciousness isn't optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild. View quote
Charles Stross
Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it's still almost all stupid. View quote
Charles Stross
Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it. View quote
Charles Stross
There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles-it isn't funny these days-that there were only a thousand real people in the UK-everybody else was a non-player character. Now it's pretty much the reverse. View quote
Charles Stross
Liz isn't simply not going by the book, she's just about throwing it in the shredder. View quote
Charles Stross
It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse. View quote
Charles Stross
A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. "Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan. (Charles Stross)
Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn't care. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. View quote
Charles Stross
Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle's lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw-just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising. View quote
Charles Stross
He's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. View quote
Charles Stross
True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism. View quote
Charles Stross