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Quotes from False Value — Ben Aaronovitch

born 1964 England

← All quotes by Ben Aaronovitch

19 quotes

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

False Value (2020)

The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight.

False Value (2020)

Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check.

False Value (2020)

Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.

False Value (2020)

And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

False Value (2020)

God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams.

False Value (2020)

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

False Value (2020)

From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what.

False Value (2020)

After that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept.

False Value (2020)

“Are you smarter than me?”
“I’ll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.”

False Value (2020)

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous

False Value (2020)

Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

False Value (2020)

“Not your type?”
“I’m strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn’t be him.”

False Value (2020)

I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri

False Value (2020)

Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added.

False Value (2020)

What was a billionaire supposed to do? There was a limit to the effectiveness of charity, and paying more taxes just meant the government wasted your money on bureaucracy and cushy jobs for civil servants.

False Value (2020)

There were a couple of mentions of drones, but the assumption was that they were operated by the police, the gangs, space lizards or all three at once. The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas.

False Value (2020)

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.

False Value (2020)

I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird.
“It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”

False Value (2020)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ben Aaronovitch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.