Nick Harkaway quotes

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.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

In 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.

I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.

At 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.

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.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.