The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle…

- Neal Stephenson

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 some…

- Neal Stephenson

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

- Neal Stephenson

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.

- Neal Stephenson

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that goo…

- Neal Stephenson

Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same.

- Neal Stephenson

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 …

- Neal Stephenson

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 — sel…

- Neal Stephenson

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

- Neal Stephenson