Charles Stross Quotes page 2

“Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 7, “A Semiotic War” (p. 159)

“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.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 188

“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.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 12, “Bag” (p. 210)

“Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 1, “Duel” (p. 1; opening line)

“The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 10, “Murder by Numbers” (pp. 160-161)

“Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (p. 298)

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Overtime (2009)
The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

““Bad day at the office?”
“It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.””

“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 18, “Connections” (p. 302)

“Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 279

“Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 22)

“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.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 251)

“Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 3 (“Tourist”), p. 88

“New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason—they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 33, “Elaine: Gentlemen and Players” (p. 275)

“As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.”

in one another’s backs
Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 13, “Hold the Front Page” (pp. 200-201)

“I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 139)

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Curse of Laundry http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/the-curse-of-laundry.html, October 19, 2014 <br class="br">The Laundry Files

“In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.”

“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 30)

“The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 16, “Liz: Mote, Eye, Redux” (p. 177)

“You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 387

“The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 248)

“It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 7, “Liz: Black Swans” (pp. 82-83)

““But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”
Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”
“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.
“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.”
“But, terrorists!”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 14, “Sybarite Class” (p. 228)

“Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (pp. 296-297)

“Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 5, “Another Day, Another Editorial” (p. 71)

“You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 215

“It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 6, “Elaine: Death or Coffee” (p. 42)

“Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 13, “Jack: In Hell” (p. 96)

“Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 4, “Magical Mystery Tour” (p. 67)

“Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 29, “Liz: Project ATHENA” (p. 305)

“Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 31, “Dominoes Fall” (p. 322)

“There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 226)

“Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 33, “Elaine: Gentlemen and Players” (p. 272)

“It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 32, “Sue: Civil Contingencies” (p. 263)

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

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 13, “Jokers” (p. 274)

“You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 17, “Mission” (p. 288)

““Didn’t I have you executed last week?”
“I very much doubt. It.””

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 12, “Toymaker: Reality Excursion” (p. 143)

“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 142)

“Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care.
Unfortunately, they were mistaken.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 317)

“Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 131)

““Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?”
“Got a problem.”
“A big one?”
“Female human-sized.””

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (pp. 154-155)

“If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals — or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link — will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 3, “The Spacelike Horizon” (p. 60)

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Concrete Jungle (2004)
The Laundry Files

“He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.”

“True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 54

“Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 11, “Circus of Death” (p. 234)

“I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (p. 155)

“Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 15, “Preparing for Ghosts and Dogs” (p. 251)

“The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 8, “Anwar: Diplomat” (p. 93)

“His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 2, “Preparations for Departure” (p. 33)

“I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 60