Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly wha… - Mark Forsyth

Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves’ slang from Queen Anne’s reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk.

Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.

Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.