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.

— Nick Harkaway

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

— Nick Harkaway

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.

— Nick Harkaway

Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.

— Nick Harkaway

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.

— Nick Harkaway

Steampunk 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

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

The reason steampunk attracts people are 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

The sergeants are shunted forward, and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Cubits does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h

— Nick Harkaway

This is the gift of focus, or willful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction.

— Nick Harkaway