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The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.

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
Facts
Latter
Nothing
Ignorant
People
Educated
Intelligent
Difference
Stupid
Differences
Whether

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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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If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.
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I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.
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This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
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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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Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
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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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Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?
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Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
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Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
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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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This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
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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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I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.
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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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