Iain Banks Quotes
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Quotes to Explore
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That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.
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The scramble to get into college is going to be so terrible in the next few years that students are going to put up with almost anything, even an education.
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Fitness, defending, the mental stuff - those were all weaknesses of mine. And I turned those into strengths.
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Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
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Someone told me, 'When you go see Pearl Jam, it's going to be a spiritual experience,' and it was. It was my first time seeing them live, and I've been a lifelong fan. Eddie Vedder's voice is a million times better live, and I couldn't believe the passion he put into every single song.
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Leaving all the glamour and air-kissing aside, at the end of the day, fashion is about operations and getting things done. The best way to be successful, therefore, is to learn from the people who do it best.
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I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.
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I think we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. You really have to be aware that just because something is good, it doesn't mean it's not going to trigger a self-destructive impulse.
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Glamour is about feeling good in your own skin.
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One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
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There has been no persecution I have not tasted, no oppression I have not suffered. I neither care for Paradise nor fear Hell. If I see my nation's belief secured, I will not even care about burning in Hell, for while my body is burning, my heart will be as if in a rose garden.
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I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
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My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I've had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm's way until they could be their own guides.
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I was actually not some sort of a child prodigy by any stretch.
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Custom adapts itself to expediency.
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No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
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If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
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The first time Adam had a chance, he laid the blame on women.
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I was supposed to have a relationship with Judy, but that never happened. Actors in series didn't have the control that they have today over their jobs.
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There seems to be no limit to which some men will go to avoid the labor of thinking. Thinking is hard work.
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The blurring of the line between policy and strategy] encouraged soldiers to make the preposterous claim that policy should be subservient to their conduct of operations, and (especially in democratic countries) it drew the statesman on to overstep the definite border of his sphere and interfere with his military employees in the actual use of their tools.
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The more you limit your choices, thereby limiting thought, the more you can simplify your life and focus your energy elsewhere.
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Terrorism benefits the Arabs, it may lay waste the Yishuv and shake Zionism. But to follow in the Arabs' footsteps and ape their deeds is to be blind to the gulf between us. Our aims and theirs run counter: methods calculated to further theirs, are ruinous to us.
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I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
