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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.

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
Good
Nazism
Things
Witch
Like
Trials
People
Message
Basic
Rise
Messages
Events
Salem

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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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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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Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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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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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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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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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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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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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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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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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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Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
Neal Stephenson
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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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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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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
Neal Stephenson
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I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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