Kerry Howley > Quotes

“We tend to think of privacy as the freedom to keep intentional secrets separate from public knowledge but privacy has been the freedom to live as if most of what passes for experience will not endure.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“The way to that armbar was some twenty movements tried and countered, twenty deceptions tendered until one stuck and Jared relaxed into the elaborate trap set for him. “Like chess” is the dull analogy of the unimaginative, but more like snake-charming, the job being one of drawing out, wooing a body from its tight clenched coil into a single yielding line.”
― Kerry Howley, Thrown

“We kill people based on metadata’ a CIA director once said, which is true and they are often the wrong people.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“The state’s view of us, written with our cooperation, is a sticky fiction. It assumes a permanent single self, for one thing, a lumbering anchored persistence. Hume called the self “a bundle of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, in perpetual flux.” What connects us to our past selves? Not our cells, dead and replaced in the span of seven years, but unstable memories, colored by every conceivable cognitive bias.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“Know that the reaching tendrils of the analytical mind, even as they wrap themselves round a million problematical abstractions, leave a universe of calamity untouched.”
― Kerry Howley, Thrown

“[A] country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it. Freedom isn't free is a true thing the right used to say, and the costs of freedom of speech are real costs, borne, in part, by those unskilled at sifting fact from fantasy. . .”
― Kerry Howley

“At a certain level of distance, proximity means nothing at all.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“Surveillance capitalism doesn't manage the system of jails. It will not kidnap you from your country of origin strap you down and pour water down your throat until you break your ribs trying to free yourself it will not collect the story of your life as an diosyncratic, veteran and frame you in court as a Taliban sympathiser, and you’re all of this information is potentially available to estate that does have the capacity to do all that if it can be collected, it can be presumably subpoenaed there will never be a state from which there is no good reason to hide the radical transparency. We have accepted step-by-step these past years is a bad we have made that we and the people with the guns in cages will stay on good terms.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“He followed the game plan to a T,” added coach Duke Roufus. “The plan was to kick him in the head.”
― Kerry Howley, Thrown

“One petabyte of information is equivalent to twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“Leaks are the way Washington DC communicates with itself. The fortress allows itself to be breached. The ship of state the same goes is the only ship that leaks from the top”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“This moment lasts for days. We can only open our mouths in a united wordless moan. We are each of us simple tools of perception, free of the clouding intellect, allowed a thinking of the body only accessible when men like Erik can, for a single solitary second, lead us outside ourselves. He has torn a small hole in consciousness. It is already closing.”
― Kerry Howley, Thrown

“You are a web of social relationships. Many, many stories can be spun from that web. "We kill people based on metadata," a CIA director once said. Which is true, and they are often the wrong people.”
― Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State