Halting State

You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.

Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.

Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right.

I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest.

“You have an evil mind!”

“And this is a bad thing how, exactly?”

There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.

Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.

It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?