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Book: Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing
Quotes of Book: Some Remarks: Essays and Other
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  1. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    The correct way to think about intelligence, in this case, is as a human quality shared by just about everyone, at least until it gets beaten out of us. Not a special gift that is bestowed on only a few. And secondly that it is a functional trait that most people find some way of using in their careers, or whatever it is that they spend their days doing. Sometimes, this trait is put to use doing theoretical physics, but much more often, it's used in raising children or building houses or operating farm machinery.
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  2. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes."
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  3. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.
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  4. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    My colleague Bruce Sterling has defined a thriller as a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States.
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  5. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit {I am paraphrasing his argument}. And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.
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  6. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.
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  7. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.
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  8. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.
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  9. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it."
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  10. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are.
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  11. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.
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  12. Neal Stephenson _ Some Remarks: Essays and Other

    The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them.
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