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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.

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
Men
Least
Injury
Constable
Feeling
Reached
Bagpipes
Age
Letting
Cigars
Pain
Bodies
Moore
Feelings
Subject
Whisky
Body
Subjects
Irritation
Without
Clothes
Cigar
Thing
Worst
Therapy
Irritations

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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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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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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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If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter it simply makes everything else vanish.
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Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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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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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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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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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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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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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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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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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.
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It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
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Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.
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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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Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
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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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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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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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