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Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
Iain Banks -
'These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?''Believe me, it would be easy.'
Iain Banks
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What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.
Iain Banks -
I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
Iain Banks -
It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.
Iain Banks -
The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
Iain Banks -
How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.
Iain Banks -
What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Iain Banks
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Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.
Iain Banks -
I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it.
Iain Banks -
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain Banks -
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.
Iain Banks -
...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
Iain Banks -
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.
Iain Banks
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All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
Iain Banks -
He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.
Iain Banks -
'So it’s false.''What isn’t?''Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.'
Iain Banks -
'Well,' he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. 'Here we are again.'
Iain Banks -
Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.
Iain Banks -
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
Iain Banks
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If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
Iain Banks -
It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting-corruption and favoritism, mostly-endemic to the system.
Iain Banks -
I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
Iain Banks -
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.
Iain Banks