"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"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 (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Show some fucking adaptability!"
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window."
— Neal Stephenson

"Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "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. 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. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"To condense fact from the vapor of nuance."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was."
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them."
— Neal Stephenson

"When the Deliverator hits the hammer, shit happens."
— Neal Stephenson

"Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"

Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nighmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!

"Just kill the one with the sword first."

"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt--you target them because they're the officers, right?"

"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?""
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue.

The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos -- people who majored in tap dancing. Feds aren't like that. Feds are serious people. Poli-sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly."
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins."
— Neal Stephenson

"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."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Gold is the corpse of value..."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof Fraa Bly' and start believing in God."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"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."
— Neal Stephenson

"Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave"
— Neal Stephenson

"Two tires fly. Two Wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"'The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.'"
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"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."
— Neal Stephenson

"I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up."
— Neal Stephenson

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

""Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance." "
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"'Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?'
'Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.'"
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules"
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor. Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string."
— Neal Stephenson

"What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum?"
— Neal Stephenson (The Confusion)

"Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. "I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me, years ago, about being intelligent," she said.

The Constable brightened all at once. "Pleased to hear it."

"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code– but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."

"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."

"Yes. Some of them never challenge it– they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel– as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."

"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"

"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded– they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity." "
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"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."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"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. They are not baffled by ambigous or even contradictory situations -- in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"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."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword."
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it . . . a speelycaptor . . . at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words."
— Neal Stephenson

""Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor." -- Fraa Erasmas, "Anathem.""
— Neal Stephenson

""Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.""
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it. . . . The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier."
— Neal Stephenson (The Big U)

""She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not *supposed* to understand her. That's *not* what she's after...she doesn't want you to understand *her* she knows *that's* impossible. She just wants you to understand *yourself*...everything else is negotiable.""
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
— Neal Stephenson