False Value Quotes

“Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“ASSUME NOTHING, believe nothing, check everything—the ABC of policing.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“If there was ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“He'd obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear. I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon. "It's that vacant expression," she said, "people just want to fill the empty void".”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“People are often short-sighted and stupid, right up to the point where they’re fucking perceptive—that point usually being the most inconvenient moment possible.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“We traced a payment from one Antem Sergeyevich Yershov, a mid-tier oligarch,’ said Silver. Mid-tier meaning that he was merely obscenely wealthy, rather than functionally an independent nation state in his own right.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Stop, police!’ I shouted, on the basis that one of these days it was going to have the right effect.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“In the first place I don’t ‘make’ anybody do anything,” she said. “I merely offer people the opportunity to participate in the glorious pageant that is my existence on Earth. In which they come away greatly enriched, both emotionally and spiritually.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Relax,” I said. “This is just first contact—we’re only going to exchange names and check he’s the right orientation.” “And what do you think the right orientation is?” asked Victor. “The one that’s facing in your direction,” I said.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“I walked away with the cheerful step of a police officer who’s just made a tricky ethical question somebody else’s problem.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Libertarians and criminals complain about the surveillance state when they see a camera. Police officers complain about it when they don’t.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“He should have been wearing a black roll-neck jumper with a faux military insignia on his chest, but obviously Skinner hadn’t been reading the script and had turned out for the final confrontation in jeans, black Nike trainers and a loose blue pinstripe collarless shirt. He was, at least, sitting in a swivel chair in front of the steady unblinking lights of the HPC rack. But he didn’t say, ‘Ahh, Mr Grant, we meet again,’ which showed a shocking lack of etiquette on his part.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Step Two: don’t panic. When Nightingale was training me he said that if you’re not dead in the first instance, then your chances of survival are much improved. ‘By how much?’ I’d asked. ‘That depends,’ said Nightingale. ‘On what?’ ‘On what happens next,’ he said.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Nightingale once had a friend called David Mellenby, who was the closest thing to a modern research scientist the Folly has ever produced. I have his unpublished notes and, while much of the math is beyond me, he did record his ideas in a sort of waking dream journal—bits of which I understand. He postulated that there were other planes of existence which he called allokosmoi, from which the various supernatural types, including practitioners, drew their power and their influence. He speculated that if a revenant stayed in a fixed location, then that place would start to overlap with the particular allokosmos from which it drew its power. I think he thought vestigia were a boundary effect of this overlap. I’m not sure if he was right about that, but it would certainly explain invisible unicorns and many other instances of weird shit.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“The magical tradition I belong to exists in the gap between the observable universe and the rational clockwork creation of the Enlightenment. There’s this power. We don’t know where it comes from or why it follows the rules it does, but it definitely exists and there are definite ways to manipulate it. Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word “quantum” to everything.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“And I personally don’t so much believe in it as have to massage its feet when I go home at night.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“More than two hours?” she said. “If we want to be safe, yeah.” “The problem here,” said Mrs. Chin, “is that may be okay for you young people but some of us are going to have trouble holding our pee for that long.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“And suddenly something was looking at me out of the darkness—huge and cool and unsympathetic. God, I hope I make my sanity check, I thought, and threw the biggest skinny grenade I could conjure at the Mary Engine.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“According to Anthony Lane, God gave the gift of spirit not just to man or living things but to all creation. So that everything—rocks, trees, my dad’s stereo—was imbued with a sort of consciousness. Postmartin has explained to me that such a belief system is called animism and is very widespread, especially in those places where the locals were sensible enough to eat any missionaries before they could open their mouths. My mum, once you’re past her surface Christianity, believes in this stuff. And I personally don’t so much believe in it as have to massage its feet when I go home at night.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“He doesn’t normally show emotions,” she said. “He’s like you Brits, only the Australian version. So when he started saying the C-word—I was shocked.” I exchanged looks with Guleed—September obviously didn’t know Australians as well as she thought she did.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Académie Royale de Philosophie Occulte. Founded in 1682, it had—unlike the Folly, its British counterpart—enjoyed official royal patronage. Or at least enjoyed it until the royals had their heads cut off.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Along with the gym and the showers, we’d sacrificed the Folly’s underground shooting range to install a custody suite of six modern cells with toilets, one medical examination suite, an exercise room, prisoner showers and, located at the north end of the suite so it could have windows into the front area, a large airy studio. Here Foxglove, when she wasn’t running naked through the Folly or sketching people in the park, worked and slept. And generated a sort of field that negated magic. We call it the MSA—the Magical Suppression Area—and we’d put in some work hours testing its limitations, although none of us had any idea how it actually worked. Now, my theory was that this field was a boundary effect caused when Foxglove draws one of David Mellenby’s allokosmoi, specifically the one colloquially known as Fairyland, closer to our reality. But I haven’t devised a way of testing that hypothesis yet. At least, not a safe one. Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“The fact that both of my apprentices have a tendency to blow things up,” said Nightingale after that incident, “has led me to reevaluate my teaching methods.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value

“Well, maybe they are different here. But the Hudson has been picking off rowboats and barges since the city was founded.” I can’t think why, I thought, but didn’t say.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value