Neal Stephenson citations (167 citations, Page 5)

Day 18 (This saying was popularized by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his "Rumsfeld's Rules" document, dating back to his tenure on the Ford Administration transition team.)
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“Why do they believe that?”
“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson

"Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, Fall 2011

“But in that we started so many things in that moment, we brought to their ends many others that have been the subject matter of this account, and so here is where I draw a line across the leaf and call it the end.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Final sentence of the novel, possibly addressing criticism of the author’s previous endings, Part 13, "Reconstitution"
Anathem (2008)

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
"Well, I wouldn't say it in public."
"Cohen," the assistant attorney general of an unnamed East Coast state meeting covertly with Sangamon Taylor near the Jersey Shore. Chapter 11
Zodiac (1988)

“Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Source: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019), Chapter 43

“Welcome to the GWOJ.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

“GWOJ?”
“Global War on Jones.”
Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 830)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said.
“Why?”

Help us translate this quote

Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

Einstein asked.
“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.”
“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 776)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three