Iain Banks Quotes
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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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How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
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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.
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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.
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Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.
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Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
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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.
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What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.
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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?
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...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.
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The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.
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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.
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'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.'
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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.
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The underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
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'Well,' he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. 'Here we are again.'
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An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
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After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.
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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.