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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.

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
Idea
Certain
Ideas
Right
Many
Strangely
Made
Knew
Things
Rather
Less

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Gold is the corpse of value.
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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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The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
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Jad said, The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters. Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.
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As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
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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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They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
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... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.
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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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It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
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What are letters?” “Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and they’re tiny, they don’t move, they’re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use ’em to make short words for long words.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
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Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
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That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
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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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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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The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future it's an awareness that this is different.
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