Showing all quotes that contain ‘Seveneves’.
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“But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“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 a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“Fighting isn’t about knowing how. It’s about deciding to.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days,” she said, deadpan.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“Being right does not always bring satisfaction,”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“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? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I’d rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“It wasn’t just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
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“All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
“We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we find meaning in randomness.”
― Neal Stephenson,