Quotes

Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.

There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ’roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?

That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a species. The strength we have, the advantage this gives us, is our ability to stand apart from the things we’ve made: to use them and set them aside; to make them prosthetic extensions of ourselves and to let them go.

A growing body of opinion thinks […] that PowerPoint privileges the presenter in an unhealthy way and has the effect of discouraging critical discussion and analysis. It may also encourage group-think. PowerPoint is a potentially dangerous instrument of persuasion.

Power is best when it's distributed most broadly. That's what democracy means. That's what freedom means. The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's.

If we believe that machines are ruining mankind, it may be that we are lacking a little in distance and cannot judge the effects of transformations as rapid as those that we have undergone. What are the hundred years of mechanical history when set against the two hundred thousand years of the history of man? We have scarcely begun to settle in this landscape of mines and power stations. Our life in this modern house has only just begun, and the house is not yet even complete.

Happy 25th birthday, Web.

This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.

Only the unknown terrifies men. Once confronted, it is no longer the unknown.

A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel.

Perhaps, though, if we join up all these minutes we are beginning secularly to observe, we could string them together in a new kind of Sabbath, where there are no men in black blighting our lives with their notions of sin, no chaining up the children’s swings for the Lord’s day. I mean a contemplative time, a time reserved to reflect. Perhaps we would feel less imperilled.

It’s obvious, but perhaps worth repeating, that everything raised is raised deliberately, nothing falls upward by accident. Everything the city lifts above itself has been given thought and design. Thought and design, then allotted a secretive existence, glimpsed now and again by the streetbound.

The idea that a private sector obliged to provide yearly dividends to shareholders and yearly bonuses to employees would be likely to provide infrastructural improvements that would be of benefit to future generations was always absurd. Infrastructural investment, almost by definition, is undertaken to provide profit for others, who can prosper from it, and pay taxes for their prosperity, taxes that can be reinvested in providing healthy, well-educated citizens who can in turn maintain, improve and exploit that infrastructure.

Absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.

Nothing remained the same for ever. Every niche-clinging individual or species that stubbornly refused change invited extinction. Adaptability was the key to survival. The world was being revived, not remade or restored, and change was the engine of revival.

The security state isn’t a person, it’s people. There’s so many of them and they’ve been given leave to take so many liberties that they’ve managed to become the environment. Like a demented terraforming project, they’re sucking down our communications and we’re breathing their air. This is an ecological disaster and it demands an ecological response. We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe.

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up.

Fleming saw the House of Rumour as the image of an intelligence service; we can know it now as an ancient vision of the internet. The haunt of credulity, rash error, empty joy and unreasoning fear. The world whispers stories to itself. This is what conspire means: to breathe with.

The slow flow of corporate will carried me through long weeks of no thought. Lacking a will of my own, I hosted the urges of the organization. This happens very easily. You start by controlling your desires, then deferring gratification and before you know it you’ve lost the ability to want altogether. Other people want for you. Friends, employers, wives, children. I was a vessel for other people’s longing.

At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions. “What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?” The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack:

Flexibility—to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.

Satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.

Extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.

This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral.