Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings.

— Nick Harkaway

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioral economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else.

— Nick Harkaway

Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very non-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.” They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling.“Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—”“I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs.

— Nick Harkaway

Modernism isn't a design ethos anymore, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.

— Nick Harkaway

Mr. Pritchard! What are you doing? Is that O-Soto-gari? No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is really very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven, or he would if there were such a place, which there is not because religion is a mystification contrived by monarchists! Again! Again, and this time do it properly!

— Nick Harkaway

Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.

— Nick Harkaway

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.

— Nick Harkaway

No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.

— Nick Harkaway

Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?"" Yes. They're prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad."" But are they more virtuous or more intelligent? Or more compassionate?"" Ha!"" Let's call that one a 'no.

— Nick Harkaway

Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.

— Nick Harkaway