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Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
Serious
Need
Protocol
Done
Considerations
Real
Competent
Needs
Consideration
Things
Whenever
World
Tradition
People
Window

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Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
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The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.
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The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
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Gold is the corpse of value.
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They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
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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.
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
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One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
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One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.
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You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.
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A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
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