Ian McDonald

Quotes

1. Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.

   p. 72

2. 

   The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.

   p. 458

3. 

   Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant.

   p. 251

4. 

   His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather.

   p. 249

5. 

   It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

   p. 223

6. 

   "This is now a matter of national security, sir."

   "This is Franz Kafka, is what it is."

   Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.

   "He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony."

   "Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue."

   p. 444

7. 

   At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure.

   p. 140

8. 

   How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47.

   p. 411

9. 

   Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

   p. 158

10. 

    He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.

    p. 21

11. 

    The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.

    p. 207

12. 

    Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

    p. 109