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

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…

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a...

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What’s the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep?...

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other...

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,...

How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?

Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he...

If money is a science, then it is a dark science…it has gone on developing…by its own rules

…crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that...

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and...

You’re British, you’re a priest, you’re a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you’re a fucking pain in the ass – so off you go!

Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

His baseline attitude toward humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was...

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own...

Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another.

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...

It’s–my God–like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.

I’d rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it… a speelycaptor… at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all...

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

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...

I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could...

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot...

Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is … Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since...