01c. 1972 ADExecutive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
02c. 1972 ADIn abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
03c. 1972 ADAt 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.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
04c. 1972 ADI grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
05c. 1972 ADWe 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.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
06c. 1972 ADAmazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
07c. 1972 ADThe 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.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
08c. 1972 ADSteampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
09c. 1972 ADPeace 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.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
10c. 1972 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
