When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

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

What people do isn’t determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses...

You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?””The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?

Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in-tune with nature.

The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that...

Indeed.

If you’ve put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe – to see you, and to give a fuck – you’ve already blown it.

Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. “I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell...

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart,...

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line...

The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power...

Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it’s provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it’s provably true, then the existence of God is...

This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But...

Topology is destiny,’ he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good...

And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curve but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put...

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...

World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk...

People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one...

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder...

It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?

We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in...

Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.

…he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast...

Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge – how...

Nell,” the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, “the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do...

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.””And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.

That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what’s your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could...

She’s a woman, you’re a dude. You’re not supposed to understand her. That’s not what she’s after…. She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself....

Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true...

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron...

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and...

A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can’t handle it when you...

every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a...

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be...

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port...

the difference between poets and mystics . . . The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that...

I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream...

… when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive,...

think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn’t.

Never been here before. It’s like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they’ve blundered into the mega jackpot” Hiro...

Gold is the corpse of value…