I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

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...

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 very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven,...

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?

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.

Intellectual property, more than ever, is a line drawn around information, which asserts that despite having been set loose in the world – and having, inevitably, been created out of an individual’s relationship with the...

Modernism isn’t a design ethos any more, 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...

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...

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.

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.

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology – he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the...

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter...

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,...

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also...

It’s not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it’s that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

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...

What will you tell him?””The truth.”Fortismer thinks about that.”Yes,” he says at last. “Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.

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...

Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.

Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

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...

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...

Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?” Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely’s that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught....

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

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...

He obliterates things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they’ve won because he’s a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It’s his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise...

Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true...

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can’t find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed...

I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good … I propose to have sex with...

He wondered if today was that day, if he’d wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he’d approve. Would he be more gentle? That might...

You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it.

Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly...

I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses...

He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against,...

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...

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

Crotch biting menace:I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals.Oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee.Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for...

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...

To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?””More...

The problem isn’t who is in charge. It’s what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are...

Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.