Nick Harkaway
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.Collection: War
In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.Collection: Finance
The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.Collection: Anger
Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.Collection: Peace
In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest.Collection: Technology
At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.Collection: Medical
A woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that.Collection: Retirement
And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.Collection: Life
I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.Collection: Wine
The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.Collection: Errors
Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.Collection: Song
I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.Collection: Sorry
Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.Collection: Home
Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.Collection: Writing
That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.Collection: Tupperware
Google says young people don't care about privacy, but when asked if they'd let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.Collection: Phones
I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.Collection: Heaven
Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.Collection: Photography
We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.Collection: Support
It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.Collection: Philosopher
The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.Collection: Other Cultures
ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.Collection: Block
In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.Collection: Ends
There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.Collection: Thinking
I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.Collection: Space
People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.Collection: Teacher
We should be worrying about if you live in the city you're more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.Collection: Media
Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.Collection: Discovery
Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.Collection: Hippie
No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.Collection: Scary
Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.Collection: Flower
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.Collection: Children
A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.Collection: Pie
Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!Collection: Mind
If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.Collection: One Day
A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.Collection: Secret
The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.Collection: People
The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.Collection: Exercise
It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.Collection: Technology