691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

Gold is the corpse of value...

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.

The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.""I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.""There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

They could not see what they could not imagine

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.

The snow moved a little and gave me a void in front of my face - air for a moment. Most importantly it kept me from panicking, and let me open my eyes. There was a dim blue-grey light. I could hear Arsibalt saying "Just enough to read by!" and Lio answering "If only you'd thought to bring a book.