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It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.

Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.

“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”

You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.