Charles Stross famous quotes

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
-- Charles Stross

#Idiot #Malfunction #Machinery

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".
-- Charles Stross

#Book #Names #People

We are, after all, ***** economicus.
-- Charles Stross

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'
-- Charles Stross

#Thinking #Interesting #Swim

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
-- Charles Stross

#Chips #Function

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
-- Charles Stross

#Motivation #Joy #Novelty

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
-- Charles Stross

#Ocean #Night #Men

Starships are all work and no fun.
-- Charles Stross

#Fun

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
-- Charles Stross

#Lawyer #Diplomacy

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?
-- Charles Stross

#Religious #College #Pigs

The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
-- Charles Stross

#Real #Order #Brain

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
-- Charles Stross

#Soul #Immortal #Software

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.
-- Charles Stross

#Mistake #Chains #Ends

I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.
-- Charles Stross

#Wearing Black #Limits #Tiny

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
-- Charles Stross

#Errors #Mad #Void

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
-- Charles Stross

#Emotional #Self #Brilliant

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.
-- Charles Stross

#Religious #Hallucinations #Apes

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?
-- Charles Stross

#Gone #Certain #Rings

Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
-- Charles Stross

#Years #Nuts

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
-- Charles Stross

#Goth #Brown #Steampunk

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
-- Charles Stross

#Religious #Children #Civilization

We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
-- Charles Stross

#Color #Safety #Comfort

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!
-- Charles Stross

#Police #Pool #Genes

--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.
-- Charles Stross

#Heart #Sleep #Personality

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.
-- Charles Stross

#Sorry #Oxygen #Gone

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
-- Charles Stross

#Thinking #Agony #Way

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"
-- Charles Stross

#Business #Law #Brain

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.
-- Charles Stross

#Atheist #Believe #Waiting

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
-- Charles Stross

#Smart #Intelligent #Average

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...
-- Charles Stross

#Bullshit #Surface #Powerpoint

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
-- Charles Stross

#Fighting #Pay #Had Enough

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
-- Charles Stross

#Memories #Dictator #Amnesia

You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.
-- Charles Stross

#Mind #Needed

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
-- Charles Stross

#Memories #Liberty #Might

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
-- Charles Stross

#Ideas #Yellow #People

I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.
-- Charles Stross

#Fun #Crazy #Reflection

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.
-- Charles Stross

#Dark #Skulls #Four

Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
-- Charles Stross

#Running #Wall #Real

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
-- Charles Stross

#Naysayers #Please #Wells

Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
-- Charles Stross

#Running #Technology #Rights

You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.
-- Charles Stross

#Thinking #People #Guy

Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
-- Charles Stross

#Matter #Remember