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.
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.
He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.
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.
It’s not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it’s that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.
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.
What will you tell him?””The truth.”Fortismer thinks about that.”Yes,” he says at last. “Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.
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.
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.
I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.
He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil.
Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.
To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?””More than possible. Likely.
Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.
Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.
Joe is never sure whether they’re mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?
Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.
Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.
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.
Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.
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.
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
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.
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.