53 Quotes by Ken MacLeod

The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all.

Shooting arrows at the iron horses of Manifest Destiny.

Oh, no," Hope said. "I'm not. No, I don't believe in all that, but it's - well, it's two things. One is my job, you know? In China? So I'm all for that side of it, the war and so on; we really have to, you know, defeat those people. And the other is, uh, my husband. He's from the Highlands and he's half native, as he puts it, and I don't know if you know what the people up there are like, but I swear if he even thought I was going to vote any other way he'd walk out on me.

He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists.

Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

These days you couldn’t keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect—

He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.

...the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn't know.But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.And his fingers began to spell it out.