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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?

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
Went
Textbooks
Guy
Underlying
Anyone
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Nowadays
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Bookstore
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Computer
Protocol
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Internet
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More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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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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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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Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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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.
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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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The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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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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Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
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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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Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs. What's the difference?
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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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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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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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And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
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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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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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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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So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
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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.
Neal Stephenson