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THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE TRUE RELIGION. ARE YOU FEELING lucky, believer?
Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.
classified so deeply that the mere knowledge that such a classification level exists is itself a state secret.
Life would be so much simpler if our adversaries could be dealt with by supersonic death on the wing—but alas, Human Resources aren’t so easily defeated.
The room we’re in resembles an aircraft hangar the way a mausoleum in a graveyard resembles a bedroom.
“Do you need any help?” “I’m afraid I’m probably beyond help . . .”
Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath,
“Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake,” I try to explain. “It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT A SANE employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.
good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry.
I’ve had an unfortunate history with managers. I’m not a team player, I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I don’t like petty office politics.
some Laundry staff socialize after work, others just don’t, and I guess she’s one of the compartmentalized kind—but
it’s got some low frequency harmonics that remind me unpleasantly of a mosquito the size of a Boeing 737.
Sick leave is no fun at all when you’re doing it on instructions from management.
These things are never terribly good at coordinating a tensegrity structure like a mammalian musculoskeletal system: even when they’re in the driving seat they’re trying to work a manual transmission with automatic-only training.
Magic is a branch of applied mathematics,
The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.
Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot.
I play the innocent expression card
Fifteen minutes later I am on my way to the office, sans shiny. Mo is still sitting at the kitchen table with a cold mug of coffee, in thrall to the JesusPhone’s reality distortion field, prodding at the jelly-bean icons with an expression of hapless fascination on her face. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the only way I’m going to earn forgiveness is to buy her one for her birthday. Such is life, in a geek household.
I don’t even like guns—I mean, they’re great fun if all you want to do is make holes in paper targets at a firing range, but for their real design purpose, saving your ass in a life-or-death emergency, no: that’s not on my list of fun things.
London Metropolitan Police have a zero-tolerance approach to anyone else carrying guns,
The I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours tap dance is a tedious occupational hazard in this line of work.
In the end we agree on the polite voice of reason delivered via the ears of his parents. I guess we must be growing old.
“Time to fit in all the heartbreak and pain of raising wee ones so they’re just old enough to appreciate the horror of it all? No thanks.”
spooning up a bowl of yogurt and gerbil food.
The cold war never entirely ended, did it? There are too many vested interests on all sides who want to keep it simmering.
The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.
On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.
And anyway, everyone knows that you don’t get useful answers by torturing people, you get useful answers by making them trust you.
commonplace for war to degrade a good man to the level of a brute,
Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions.
the Dustbin got a reluctant tip-off from the FBI that a bunch of nutty Jeezmoids from the every-sperm-is-sacred crowd were planning on making a big splash at the UN Population Fund summit in Den Haag last week.
It’s not terrorism in America this decade if they shoot doctors or firebomb family planning clinics, you know?”
the key insight you need to bear in mind is, they’re anti-birth control. Very anti-birth control, with overtones of accelerating the Second Coming by bringing more souls to Earth until Jesus can’t ignore their suffering anymore—is
I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved;
But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.
I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible...
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To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, ...
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I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist.
Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype.
once you start sending assassins to bump off the oppo, you’ve got no guarantee that their assassins aren’t going to outperform yours. The reason great powers don’t usually engage in wars of assassination is that it levels the playing field.
(Thus do we damn ourselves, by the treachery of our own words.)
as the man who used to be president said, it all depends on what you mean by the word “is.”
the entire cesspit is about to be ingested by a jet engine.
being on the receiving end of a Laundry warrant card is an oh-shit moment.
Her attention is a million kilometers away from the articles, but they serve as a distraction for her eyes.
life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you’ve got, the less shit you have to eat.
There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you. It’s petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families. Dad’s a dictator, Mum’s henpecked, and the kids keep quiet if they know what’s good for them—all the while soaking up the lesson that mindless obedience is the only safe course of action. These kids often rescue themselves, but some of them don’t. They grow up to be thugs, insecure and terrified of uncertainty, intolerant and unable to handle back-chat, willing to use violence to get what they want.
Greed isn’t automatically dangerous on its own, and petty authoritarians aren’t usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity—but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.
