# Charles Stross - Quotes: 115 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross ## Books - [Accelerando](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/accelerando.md) — 27 quotes - [Glasshouse](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/glasshouse.md) — 12 quotes - [Halting State](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/halting-state.md) — 8 quotes - [Iron Sunrise](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/iron-sunrise.md) — 13 quotes - [Rule 34](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34.md) — 22 quotes - [Saturn's Children](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/saturns-children.md) — 6 quotes - [Singularity Sky](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/singularity-sky.md) — 27 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace. p. 116 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/policing-is-one.md) > Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising. p. 154 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/some-say-the.md) > Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into the cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world. p. 204 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/saturns-children/our-creators-reverted.md) > Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave. p. 143 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/little-white-lies.md) > Truly the jaws of irony are agape! p. 157 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/truly-the-jaws.md) > Perforce, the family that preys together stays together. p. 251 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/perforce-the-family.md) > But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done. p. 229 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/but-policing-crime.md) > Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away. p. 93 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/privacy-is-a-luxury.md) > Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties. p. 155 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/ninety-five-percent-of-all.md) > The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law. > > Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired. p. 82 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/the-unspoken-ideology.md) > “The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’” p. 177 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/the-programmers-have.md) > Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that? > > Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that. p. 303 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/saturns-children/let-me-give.md)