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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.

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
Stories
Principles
Restricts
Mind
Path
Evolves
World
Story
Internally
Moment
Governs
Action
Evolve
Tell
Points
Next
Consistent
Moments
Principle

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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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 of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
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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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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
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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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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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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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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
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In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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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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Gold is the corpse of value.
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I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
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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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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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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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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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So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
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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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