Charles Stross

“Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”

“To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?”

“Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)”

“The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)”

“They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.”

“Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".”

“Never bring a knife to a gun fight," I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off.”

“I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs”

“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

“Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.”

“Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...”

“She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.”

“Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.”

“The European Parliament responded by focusing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged - those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour.”

“I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.”

“Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.”

“Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.”

“Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.”

“Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”

“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

“Jest upalny letni wtorek. Stoi na placu przed dworcem Centraal, ma włączone gałki oczne. Kanał skrzy się słońcem, wokół śmigają skutery i rowerzyści-kamikadze, ze wszystkich stron trajkocą turyści. Plac pachnie wodą, ziemią, rozgrzanym metalem i spalinami z zimnych katalizatorów, jak pierdnięciem; w tle podzwaniają tramwaje, nad głową fruwają ptaki. ”

“Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...”

“We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!”

“Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.”

“Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.”

“Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!”

“Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)”

“The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”

“--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.”

“MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY.”

“You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason.”