English - Novelist | 1972 -
The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
Nick Harkaway
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With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
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Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
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In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.
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The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
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We don't need to chase a nostalgic rendering of Britain as it never was and never can be: we need instead an understanding of who we really are and what a happy, prosperous, just nation might look like.
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Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese.
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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.
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I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.
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We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
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My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
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I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.
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