The Delirium Brief Quotes

“As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“It’s almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress … or perhaps it’s over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“The vampire has just realized she’s in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“But I can’t be in three places at once!” “Tough,” says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. “You’re management now; isn’t it time you learned to delegate?”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“where it’s not unusual for certain senior personnel to keep such a low profile that only the payroll computers in HR can remember their names.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“either they’re trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig’s Uncle Bertie’s left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers’ tears) or”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Time slips slowly away until Iris’s coffee is a memory of bitterness dusted with cocoa,”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“It’s lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world’s most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up—the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“But otherwise it’s darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Some knowledge is inherently corrupting,”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy’s Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force … but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they’re left out. And the Army of the Navy has its own Air Force, the USMC Air Corps, and they’ve got aircraft carriers. It”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Then the red light comes on above the camera, and I’m live on a Monday evening special crisis edition of Newsnight.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“can’t decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Some invasions barely warrant the name.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth—it’s a Boeing 777 or Airbus A330 and it’s nearly two miles away, a distantly rational part of me realizes—”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.)”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“the geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population’s faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to something like ninety million person-centuries-worth of belief. Hence the, shall we”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“It’s almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress … or perhaps it’s over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. I”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“All around the UK, the lights are going out and the shutters are falling across the doors of dozens of offices and remote installations. The lights will stay on for a while longer at a handful of sites that are only tenuously connected to the rest of the nation, sites that are isolated by virtue of the perilous forces they work with or by the most draconian of security perimeters; but the orders have been issued, and by Friday evening the Laundry as an organization will have ceased to exist.   FIVE BREAKOUT Zero drives me out of the center of London efficiently and calmly. I”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief