Nick Harkaway Quotes

This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.

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.

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.

It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.

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.

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

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.