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226e088
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Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.
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Iain M. Banks |
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d8578b1
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They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody."
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paranoid
dialogue
cynical
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Iain M. Banks |
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b4f322b
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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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morality
greed
indictment
nihilistic
dystopia
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Iain M. Banks |
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67e88f6
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Zakalwe, in all 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 simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
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Iain M. Banks |
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b7ffc0a
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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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a8e3ece
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All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the ..
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games-theory
gaming-theory
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Iain M. Banks |
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e8f2d30
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There has seldom if ever 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 simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
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war
soldiers
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Iain M. Banks |
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2ae2975
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People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8e70994
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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e20e2d7
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The bomb lives only as it is falling.
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Iain M. Banks |
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48a61d6
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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31352ef
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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49e5018
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It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said. She laughed. 'Really?' The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c824a5a
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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6457734
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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81949f1
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,
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Iain M. Banks |
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d9f220c
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Escape is a commodity like anything else
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escape
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Iain M. Banks |
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59da1c0
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The truth is not always useful, not always good. It's like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.
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Iain M. Banks |
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78b1bb7
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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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Iain M. Banks |
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78bc10a
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Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...
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stupidity
galaxies
jernau-morat-gurgeh
time-travel
mistakes
shame
regret
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Iain M. Banks |
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4d62288
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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3691ec9
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One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c7e2036
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Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "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." " , eh?" Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted. "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect..
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excuses
erens
justifications
belief
instinct
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Iain M. Banks |
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e2bfa3c
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I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
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Iain M. Banks |
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92bc416
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Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar's obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?" -"Well, first, I didn't cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus."
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Iain M. Banks |
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30f918d
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There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.
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same-sex
homosexuality
transgender
queer
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Iain M. Banks |
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3ae4a20
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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0a44dfd
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Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ed69d0d
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But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserve..
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Iain M. Banks |
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91a4861
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All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilization ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen ice - all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left. So much for their humanity, or whatever they chose to call it, thought Unaha-Closp. Only their machines remained. But would any of the others learn? Would they see this for what it was, this frozen rockball? Would they, indeed!
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Iain M. Banks |
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3e596a0
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I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn..
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Iain M. Banks |
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e36ae68
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It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
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Iain M. Banks |
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9af5308
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It was a warship, after all. It was built, to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that--by some criteria--a warship, just by the perfe..
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morality
military
weapons
technology
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Iain M. Banks |
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969eccc
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There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who'd made it. It was just part of the way things worked - part of the complexity of life, he supposed - that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration. At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whet..
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Iain M. Banks |
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3a7e959
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I am not answering these questions anymore," I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. "We should have gone metric years ago." Iain Banks"
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Iain M. Banks |
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05e1311
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Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances -- and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse -- then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a0f5a14
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Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot,
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Iain M. Banks |
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e4c7b58
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It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; th..
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Iain M. Banks |
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839bdbd
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God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, an..
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Iain M. Banks |
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565eeed
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Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere? I found that I couldn't believe that it was. Neither was dad's, neither was Rory's, nor Aunt Fiona's, nor Darren Watt's. There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the compr..
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Iain M. Banks |
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abb6333
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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." "So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass."
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death
religion
changer
dorolow
mess-room
survival
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Iain M. Banks |
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1d710dc
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So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?" "Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants."
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Iain M. Banks |
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d2c8add
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But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.
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ephemerality
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Iain M. Banks |
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733ef93
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The History Of The Universe In Three Words CHAPTER ONE Bang! CHAPTER TWO sssss CHAPTER THREE
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science
inspirational
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Iain M. Banks |