Cryptonomicon

Секс — это то, где вылезают наружу подавленные желания. Люди сильнее всего заводятся, когда обнажаются их самые глубинные тайны…

-как на счет снов?
-это просто шум в нейронах.

Как все, идущее под UNIX'oм (Finux -- вариант UNlX'а), она имеет миллион разных опций, разобраться в которых под силу только очень молодому, одинокому или одержимому человеку. Рэнди прошел в жизни все три стадии, поэтому про опции знает много.

An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.

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 school children doing their lessons, improving their minds.

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn’t work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you’re not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you’d be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices — who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron."

My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at McDonald’s your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people’s feelings sometimes.

Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.

But there is something that he could be doing. This is why laptops were invented, so that important business persons would not fritter away long flights relaxing.