JW

“The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than his planet; the by-laws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, and the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will . . .”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy