Neal Stephenson Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

2. A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

3. Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish. Cryptonomicon

4. Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man. Quicksilver

5. If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy. Anathem

6. The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.""I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.""There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators. Anathem

7. They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right. Anathem