Iain Banks Quotes
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Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
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Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.
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You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
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That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.
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'Is all this serious?' Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.'Deadly serious,' Flere-Imsaho told him. Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
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Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.
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Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
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An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.
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In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
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'You’re a wicked man.''Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.'
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She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death-and she did feel a little admiration-but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.
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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
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Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.
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'Don’t you have a religion?' Dorolow asked Horza.'Yes,' he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. 'My survival.'
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Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
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The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. 'You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,' Hamin told him. Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.
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I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
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I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
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That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
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'I’m from out of town,' he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
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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
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
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What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.
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People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.