The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Nick Harkaway

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.

Heart, Simple, Decisions

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.

Children, Government

Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.

Country, Nation, Serve

I do public appearances. I’m bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes, and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on.

Funny, Clothes, Appearances

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

forever, heartache, heartbreak, love, love-hurts, love-letter, lovers

He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn’t. But they had silence, and not many people had that.

relationships, silence

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.

lies, photography

What will you tell him?””The truth.”Fortismer thinks about that.”Yes,” he says at last. “Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.

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.

copyright, culture, digital, ip, piracy, technology

You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it.

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.

advice, cannibals, logic

Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?””Yes. They’re prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad.””But are they more virtuous or more intelligent? Or more compassionate?””Ha!””Let’s call that one a ‘no.

compassion, corruption, government, human-nature, intelligence, leaders, politicians, politics, power