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In the Beginning...Was the Command Line
Neal Stephenson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.”
“I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.”
“What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.”
“Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!" Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!" Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!" Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!”
“it comes out of the fact that during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”
“think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics: universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27…. and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the enter key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes—and the whack you hear is another Big Bang.”
“The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.”
“The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I”
“Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays through a wall. Probably”
“Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols—every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every “a” is the same as every other “a,” and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That”
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Book Keywords:
humor, philosophy