English - Novelist | 1972 -
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
Nick Harkaway
YouKnowHardYesSurveillanceHow
Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
HumanityEarthLivedIdentifyHow
Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.
LegsHimDragonsWitchesEarnedHe
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.
DayPeaceHabitYouLoseChoice
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
FearWarSufferingWorldHorrorGas
Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.
FinancialBetterWealthEarlyBubble
A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.
RideWaitingEndYouBadLights
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
WorkGreatCreativeLeadSupposed
In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
PerspectivePeopleOpinionSociety
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.
TechnologyPeopleMindThoughtYou
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
PerformanceEnjoyWrongKnowSaid
Knowledge is not just power - it is control.
KnowledgePowerControlJust
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Nick Harkaway quotes