Chandler Webster’s Reviews > The Ministry for the Future > Status Update

“…all the young people on Earth, and all the generations of humans in the centuries to come, and all their cousin creatures on the planet who could never speak for themselves, especially in court — all these living beings added up to something like a poor and vulnerable developing nation… these new citizens were young and weak… and yet they had rights too…”

“People who have it all, who don’t want anything, they’re lost. If you want something and your work gets you closer to it, that’s the only happiness.”

“The pursuit,” he said.

“Yes. The pursuit of happiness is the happiness.”

“Fuck Margaret Thatcher… and I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the tap runs dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure.”

“But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. The evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project, they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak…”