{"author":"Nick Harkaway","author_id":"Nick+Harkaway","total_quotes":57,"quotes":[{"text":"Destiny' is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what's life? Consciousness without volition. We'd all be passengers, no more real than model trains.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["angelmaker","consciousness","destiny","nick-harkaway"],"id":8695,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"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.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["copyright","culture","digital","ip","piracy","technology"],"id":12428,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”“There will not.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["humour","relationships","supervillains"],"id":22391,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["industrialism","machines","moderism","technology"],"id":27500,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"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.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["humorous"],"id":36140,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["cooking","flapjacks","humor","pancakes","soldiers","war"],"id":39254,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["digital","government","home","personal","power","privacy","state","truth"],"id":43015,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["home","creativity","think "],"id":51059,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"Don't fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There's just not being dead.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["survival"],"id":61270,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"},{"text":"Crotch biting menace:I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals.Oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee.Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners.Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty.Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age.","author":"Nick Harkaway","tags":["crotch-biting-menace","quote"],"id":61752,"author_id":"Nick+Harkaway"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":57,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}