Nick Harkaway Quotations | Page 2

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.

I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

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.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

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.

Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.

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.

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.

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.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

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.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

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.

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.

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.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

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.

That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

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.

Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

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.

Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

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.

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.

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

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.

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.