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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.
Iain Banks -
He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.
Iain Banks
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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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Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.
Iain Banks -
I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.
Iain Banks -
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.
Iain Banks -
'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.'
Iain Banks -
He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.
Iain Banks
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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.
Iain Banks -
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.
Iain Banks -
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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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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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.
Iain Banks
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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.
Iain Banks -
Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks -
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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'I’m from out of town,' he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
Iain Banks -
He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
Iain Banks -
'You’re a wicked man.''Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.'
Iain Banks
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What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
Iain Banks -
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.
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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