The Big U Quotes

“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: A Hilarious Satire of American College Life

“It’s as though anyone who argues clearly can’t be trusted—that’s the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I’m just at a loss to understand. I can’t talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I’ll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can’t support any position, only the right position. If it’s not right, the words won’t make it so. That’s the value of clear language.” This”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U: A Hilarious Satire of American College Life

“Virgil returned to the Operator’s Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code sections and interleave them into one huge powerful program that seemed to coalesce out of nowhere, having already penetrated the Worm’s locks and defenses. This monster program, then, had calmly proceeded to wipe out all administrative memory and all student and academic software, and then to restructure the Operator to suit Virgil’s purposes. It all went—payroll records, library overdues, video-game programs. From the computer’s point of view, American Megaversity ceased to exist in the time it took for a micro-transistor to flip from one state to the other.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“One of my professors has interesting things to say about the similarity between the way organ pipes are controlled by keys and stops, and the way random-access memory bits are read by computers.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“Sarah’s entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say “hi” to her.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose—that’s like people not understanding your interactions.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U

“in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Big U