691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.

Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he’s about to go down in flames.

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. – HOBBES, Leviathan.

The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.

Arsibalt was horrified. “But how can you not be fascinated by – ” “I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.

Fearless for oneself, fear for others – that must be what it means to be a hero.

There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you.

The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2 – 216 power to be exact – and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that’s how many digits a computer can recognize.

This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form.