Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson

Author

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Snow Crash (1992)

  • "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 hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds."
    • [Juanita talking to Hiro]
  • "He's chasing him," Squeaky says.
    "Who's chasing whom?"
    "Well, your friend Y.T. ain't no Edward R. Murrow. But as far as we can tell from her reports, they've been sighted in the same area, trying to kill each other," Squeaky says. He's speaking with the slow, distant tones of someone who is getting live updates over his headphones.
    "They were doing some kind of a deal earlier," Hiro says.
    "Then I ain't hardly surprised they're trying to kill each other now."
  • "Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says.
    "Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know?"
  • "Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing-- is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
    Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"
  • "Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms-- like me-- are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before."
  • 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 studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
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The Diamond Age (1995)

  • "We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-- he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
  • "So, if the Shanghainese gentleman were to request that our engineer partake in activities that we would normally consider unethical or even treasonous, we might take an uncharacteristically forgiving stance. Providing, that is, that the engineer kept us well-informed."
    "Would that be something like being a double agent, then?" Hackworth said.
    Napier winced, as if he were being caned himself. "It is a crashingly unsubtle phrase. But I can forgive your using it in this context."
    "Would John Ziabatsu then make some kind of formal commitment to this arrangement?"
    "It is not done that way," Major Napier said.
    "I was afraid of that," Hackworth said.
    "Typically such commitments are superfluous, as in most cases the party has very little choice in the matter."
    "Yes," Hackworth said, "I see what you mean."
  • So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.
  • "Did the Primer teach you that people would pull your hair?"
    "No, Sir."
    "Did it teach you that your mother's boyfriends would beat you up, and your mother not protect you?"
    "No, sir, except insofar as it told me stories about people who did evil."
    "People doing evil is a good lesson. What you saw in there a few weeks ago"-- and by this Nell knew he was referring to the headless soldier on the mediatron-- "is one application of that lesson, but it's too obvious to be of any use. Ah, but your mother not protecting you from boyfriends-- that has some subtlety, doesn't it?"
    "Nell," the Constable continued, indicating, through is tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between stupid and intelligent people--and this is true whether or not they are well-educated--is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations--in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."
    "In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. You life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were several decades younger."
    The Constable turned and walked back into his house, leaving Nell alone in the garden, pondering the meaning of that last statement. She supposed it was the sort of thing she would understand later, when she had become intelligent.
  • He nodded in the direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets, but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shoveling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants."
  • "You do these things not to serve your Queen but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side."
    • Dr X, talking to Hackworth
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Cryptonomicon (1999)

  • Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.
    • This is the first line in the book (not counting the prologue). The quote below about the "opening line problem" refers back to this.
  • If the action is one that could never have happened unless the Americans were breaking Indigo, then it will constitute proof, to the Nipponese, that the Americans have broken it. The existence of the source-- the machine that Commander Schoen built-- will be revealed.
    Waterhouse trusts that no Americans will be that stupid. But what if it isn't that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?
  • Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, "So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.
    Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.
  • They argued about whether aboriginies would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed-- just because they were primitive didn't mean they couldn't have taste. Andrew accused him of being a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together, armed with nothing but knives and Andrew's collection of exquisitely crafted vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking about eating some insects. "Q.E.D," Andrew said.
  • One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running. Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards.
  • The messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the best place to order pizza? and Where did you hide the staples? and have now gotten to the point of e-mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote several years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly clever I haven't figured out yet?
  • 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 reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this until now was that they wanted to work out the problem face-to-face, in two-person conversations. In other words, they did it to protect us-- not to hide anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news."
    Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.
    "I stipulate that this does not make sense," Randy says.
    Eb glares into the distnace, not mollified.
    "Will you agree with me that the world is full of irrational people, and crazy situations?"
    "Jaaaa--" Eb says guardedly.
    "If you and I are going to hack and get paid for it, people have to hire us, right?"
    Eb considers it carefully. "Yes."
    "That means dealing with those people, at some level, unpleasant as it may be. And accepting a whole lot of other nonsense, like lawyers and PR people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go out of our minds. True?"
    "Most likely, yes."
    "It is good, then, that people like Avi and Beryl have come into existence, because they are our interface." An image from the Cold War comes into Randy's head. He reaches out with both hands and gropes in the air. "Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?"
    Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.
    "But that doesn't mean that it's going to be like programming computers. They can only filter and soften the irrational nature of the world beyond, so Avi and Beryl may still do things that seem a little crazy."
  • "And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?"
    "Uh... enhancing shareholder value?"
    "Very funny."
  • "I found weaknesses everywhere," Von Hacklheber says. "Most codes were designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying mathematics. It is really quite pitiable."
    "Including the Enigma?" Bischoff asks.
    "Don't even talk to me of that shit," Von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed with it almost immediately."
    "What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.
    "Proved that it was shit," Von Hacklheber says.
    "But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.
    Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?"
  • DMS evinced skepticism as to moral fiber of Yours Truly, commenced with a series of probing questions aimed at establishing my commitment to Mission, fiduciary resp. to Epiphyte shareholders, level of physical & mental vigor, and overall level of "serious"-ness (being "serious" is some kind of umbrella concept strongly correlated with my fitness to live, to have the privilege of knowing DMS, and to go on dates with his daughter.)
    • from Randy's report to his business partners
  • Let's see Turing expain this one! Because what this proves, beyond all doubt, is that there is a God, and furthermore that He is a personal friend and supporter of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The opening line problem is solved, neat as a theorem. Q.E.D., baby.
  • "I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?"
    "September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her."
    "Wow."
    "Girl talk."
    "I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk."
    "We can all do it."
  • Ask a Russian engineer to design you a shoe, and he'll give you something that looks like the box the shoe came in. Ask him to design something that will slaughter Germans, and he turns into Thomas fucking Edison.
  • "One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept-- because everybody's been there-- but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it."
    "Which is still kind of pathetic."
    "It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic."
    "What, then?"
    "I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."
  • Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
  • "That time in Seattle-- during the lawsuit-- was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
    "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."
    "Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize."
    "Well, I think agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."
    "Now, after all those years-- all that fucking work-- I'm back where I started. A net worth of zero. Except this time I don't even have a girlfriend per se."
    "Well," Avi says, "to begin with, I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene."
    "Ouch! You are a cruel man."
    "Sometimes wanting is better than having."
    "Well, that's good news," Randy says brightly, "because--"
    "Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?"
    "Okay, okay."
  • Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.
    • [Stephenson spelled "hokeyness" two different ways in this paragraph]
  • But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that cryptosystem is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to criticize a film (e.g., by slotting it into a particular genre or movement) and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of unexposed film and actually make one.
  • "Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.
    Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have email?"
  • "You know what this is? It's one of those men-are-from-mars, women-are-from-venus things."
    "I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying."
    "It's one of those American books where once you're heard the title you don't even need to read it," Randy says.
    "Then I won't."
  • "Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.
    "I don't understand."
    "If you want to understand, look out the Window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompases half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Phillippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here--" he points to his head "--in the intelligence of the people, and here--" he holds out his hands "--in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
    • Goto Dengo, talking to Avi and Randy in the present
  • "But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things."
    • Goto Dengo, talking to Enoch Root in 1945
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Quicksilver

Volume One of the Baroque Cycle. It should be noted that the historical personas quoted here have been fictionalized by Stephenson.

  • "But Enoch knew that the alchemists of Europe were men just like Clarke--hoping, and dreading, that Enoch would return with the news that some English savant, working in isolation, had found the trick of refining, for the base, dark, cold, essential foecal matter of which the world was made, the Philosophick Mercury--the pure living essense of God's power and presence in the world--the key to the transmutation of metals, the attainment of immortal life and perfect wisdom.
    • "Enoch in England, 1655"
  • "Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was."
    • "Enoch in England, 1655"
  • "But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place--that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."
    • "Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay, October 1713"
  • "It is a symbol of Mercury--patron of commerce--who has been worshipped in this cellar--and in this city--for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adapts itself to any container."
    • Mr. Ham, in reference to a caduceus. "Plague Year: Daniel in London"
  • "I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent."
  • "I believe that binary arithemetickal engines will be of enormous significance"
    • Wilkins, "Wilkins on his Deathbed"
  • Waterhouse: "Now, if you--the ingenious Dr. Leibniz--contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking--is that really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?"
  • Leibniz: "You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God's genius?"
  • Waterhouse: "If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking."
  • Leibniz: "This is one of the two great labryrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it--which must have been a great spiritual struggle--and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination."
    • excerpted, "Daniel and Leibniz Discourse (1)"
  • "Where do we find God in the world? That is all I want to know. I have not found Him yet. But when I see anything that does not rot--the workings of the solar system, or a Euclidean proof, or the perfection of gold--I sense I am drawing nearer to the Divine."
  • "When Newton encounters a truth--such as the inverse square law of gravity--he does not even consider trying to understand it, but instead says that the world simply is this way, because that is how God made it. To his way of thinking, any truths of nature lie outside the realm of Natural Philosophy and belong to a realm he thinks is best approached through the study of alchemy. Let me tell you why Newton is wrong."
  • "Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature. To me, this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the role of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us. In some things, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, God may not have had any choice when He created the world. In others, such as the inverse square law of gravity, He may have had choices; but in such cases, I like to believe he would have chose wisely and according to some coherent plan that our minds--insofar that they are in God's image--are capable of understanding.
  • "Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it."
    • Waterhouse, "Carver and Gripp"
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The Confusion

Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

  • "So to me England seems like an enormous Lyon: poor in specie but rich in credit, and thriving through a system of paper transfers."
    • Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, "Timber Expedition Post-Mortem"
  • "On a battlefield, a Cavalier may attire himself in magnificent armor and ride forth on a brilliant steed to engage the foe in single combat; and what is the better, he does so in full view of many other like him, so that those who survive the day can get together in their tent when it is all over and agree on what happened. But on the sea, all is different, for our dashing fop is lumped together with all the other men on the ship."
    • Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, "The Stables of the Royal Chateau at Versailles"
  • "Our level of knowledge progresses through progressively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God."
    • Leibniz, "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "We cannot perform all the calculations needed without turning every atom in the Universe into a cog in an Arithmetickal Engine; and then it would be God--"
    • Leibniz, "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "What conceivable theory could explain the discernability of those two planets, without making reference to their positions in absolute space?"
    • Fatio, "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "When we consider their perceptions of one another--we see that they are different. So they are discernable! And what is more, they may be discerned without reference to some sort of fixed, absolute space."
    • Leibniz, "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "I know it sounds difficult, Monsieur Fatio, but 'twill work out better in the long run."
  • "Physics, then, becomes a sort of vast record-keeping exercise."
    • "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does."
    • Leibniz, "Leibniz and Fatio at Wolfenbuttel"
  • "He was selling us insurance against the contingency that our invasion fails to fail."
    • "Samuel Bernard to Eliza, 23 May 1692"
  • "What does it say of us that our economy is built 'pon forms and figments while that of Spain is built 'pon silver?"
  • "Some would say it speaks to our advancement."
  • "I say only that ink, once dried on the page, is a brittle commodity, and an economy made of ink is likewise brittle."
    • Daniel Waterhouse and Roger Comstock, "Roger and Daniel at a Coffee-house"
  • "The quality of money is only partly due to the purity of its metal--which any Natural Philosopher could see to. It is also a matter of trust, of prestige."
    • Roger Comstock, "Roger and Daniel at a Coffee-house"
  • "The confusion of which you speak is the death-throes of an old system."
  • "The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French."
  • "The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds."
    • "Eliza to Rossignol, March 1694"
  • "My services are much in demand of late, owing to some confusion in the world of money."
    • "Jean Bart to Eliza, May 1694"
  • "You have destroyed me. But I have a boy who calls me Papa. If you had admitted to being his mother, what would your estate be to-day? And would it be better or worse than what you have?"
    • Lothar von Hacklheber to Eliza, "Eliza and Caroline Journey to Leipzig"
  • "I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess--but wrong."
    • Lothar von Hacklheber, "Eliza and Caroline Journey to Leipzig"
  • "Tactics, are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy."
  • "Who won?"
  • "Neither, for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess. Perhaps the winner shall be Johann Jean-Jacques von Hacklheber."
    • Leibniz and Caroline, "Eliza and Caroline Journey to Leipzig"
  • "Confusion is a kind of bewitchment--a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature."
    • Eliza to Johann, "Eliza to Jean Bart, May 1694"
  • "I christen thee Minerva"
    • Jack Shaftoe, "Trial by Crocodile"
  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo."
    • Enoch Root, "Minerva's Japanese Transaction"
  • "You will readily agree that arithmetickal engines will only get better with time. On the other hand--with due respect to Wilkins and the Philosophical Language--we have only just embarked upon the amassing of data and the writing-out of the logical rules that will govern the machine's workings."
    • "Leibniz's 1700 Letter to Daniel"
  • "They tell a story--albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way--of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men that Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition."
    • Edmund de Ath (Eduoard de Gex), "Mexico"
  • "Enjoy your perch up there, Mister Newton, because Jack the Coiner has come back to London-town, and he aims to knock you down; the game has begun and may the best man win!"
    • Jack Shaftoe, "Jack Comes Home"
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The System of the World

Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

  • Daniel declined the tobacco with a wave of his hand. "One day that Indian weed will kill more white men, than white men have killed Indians."
    • Daniel Waterhouse, "Daniel at the Court of Stannary"
  • "Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the eternal by way of the mundane."
    • Daniel Waterhouse to Peter Hoxton ("Saturn"), "Meeting of the Clubb at Clerkenwell 1714"
  • "There is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read."
    • Dappa to Roger Comstock, "Daniel and Dappa at the Kit-Cat Clubb"
  • "Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he'd plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone."
    • Daniel Waterhouse, "Daniel and Saturn Make a Lay at a Ken"
  • "The war is over; most of the great conflicts have been sorted out; Natural Philosophy has conquered the realm of the mind; and now--today-- as we stand here--the new System of the World is being writ down in a great Book somewhere."
    • Daniel Waterhouse to Princess Caroline, "Caroline and Sophie at Herrenhausen"
  • "Your punched cards are the Coin of a new Realm."
    • Eliza to Daniel, "Clerkenwell Court, 19 June 1714"
  • "I'm keen to know whether the next English King is going to be German or French."
    • Jack Shaftoe, "Jack, Daniel, and Isaac Strike a Deal"
  • "We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there."
    • Roger Comstock, "Ravenscar and Bolingbroke"
  • "The sorts who found a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial."
    • "Billingsgate Dock"
  • "As a Mill makes Flour, a Loom makes Cloth, and a Forge makes Steel, so, we are assured, the Engine shall make Power."
    • Dappa, "A Meditation Upon Power" within "Marlborough's Levee 4 August 1714"
  • "I cannot summon anything like the fury of Newton, hot as a refiner's fire."
    • Daniel, "A Stowaway in a Vault-Wagon"
  • "Though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have cause many to question the existence of God."
  • "As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed."
    • Princess Caroline "Philosophick Showdown at Leicester House"
  • "But I'd have you know that my Stupidity and my Skepticism are two sides of the same coin, and are of a very particular kind, which is carefully thought out."
  • "The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan't be able to understand--and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant'sy he has got it all figured out."
  • "Pray explain how it is that there may be such a thing as free will, and a spirit that may do as it pleases, unbound by the Mathematick laws of our Mechanical Philosophy."
    • Waterhouse on Skepticism, "Philosophick Showdown at Leicester House"
  • "The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed--the Subtile Spirit."
    • Isaac Newton, "Philosophick Showdown at Leicester House"
  • "Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice."
    • Isaac Newton, ibid.
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  • "Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ("trilogy"). In my mind this work is something like 7 or 8 connected novels. These have been lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint, but they could just as well have been put all together in a single immense volume or separated into 7 or 8 separate volumes. So to slap the word "trilogy" on it would be to saddle it with a designation that is essentially bogus. Having said that, I know everyone's going to call it a trilogy anyway."
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