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  "title": "Zodiac",
  "slug": "zodiac",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Neal Stephenson",
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      "slug": "talking-to-cancer",
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      "text": "Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom. It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet.",
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      "slug": "and-i-hadnt",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/and-i-hadnt",
      "text": "And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed.... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say \"More than twice the legal limit,\" they get comfortably outraged.",
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      "slug": "one-of-the",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/one-of-the",
      "text": "One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.",
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      "text": "The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.",
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      "slug": "he-had-a-sense",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/he-had-a-sense",
      "text": "He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.",
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      "slug": "i-dont-mean",
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      "text": "I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventative measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators.",
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      "slug": "im-not-that",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/im-not-that",
      "text": "I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.",
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      "slug": "i-followed-him",
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      "text": "[I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.",
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      "slug": "he-wanted-justice",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/he-wanted-justice",
      "text": "He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.",
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      "slug": "nothing-in-a-hardware",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/nothing-in-a-hardware",
      "text": "Nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.",
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      "text": "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. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up.",
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      "text": "“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.” “So?” “Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”",
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