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d77892d
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The way to a man's heart is through his chest!
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Iain M. Banks |
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b8b6f60
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I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with "BANG! Expand! Sssss...," then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settl..
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contexxt
ending
endings
stories
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Iain M. Banks |
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26be6bd
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Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
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Iain M. Banks |
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455dd41
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You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.
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Iain M. Banks |
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f0208a0
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But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
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Iain M. Banks |
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d49de31
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Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5278266
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Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
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Iain M. Banks |
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22d4770
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I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture -- that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them -- but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They -- get this -- they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, li..
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sarcasm
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Iain M. Banks |
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989942b
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That is the way with all of your kind... It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.
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Iain M. Banks |
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36e09c7
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You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn't, you could still find out a lot.
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Iain M. Banks |
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454f364
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Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best.
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Iain M. Banks |
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90bcaf5
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You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.) No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered. She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that.
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shias-engin
meet-cute
transience
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Iain M. Banks |
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e7a17d0
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
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Iain M. Banks |
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be9b76d
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An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power - or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness - a similar distinction?
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Iain M. Banks |
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ccdb371
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Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will alwa..
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socialism
earthers
free-enterprise
economics
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Iain M. Banks |
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2daa31a
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Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he'd had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter an..
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religion
government
revolution
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Iain M. Banks |
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fd976b9
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Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.
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Iain M. Banks |
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879df2b
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Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
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slurs
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Iain M. Banks |
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86fe78a
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It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called "human nature" - the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural"
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Iain M. Banks |
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a3b75c2
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Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6b67654
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He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen -- a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onward and decide, and keeping moving and keeping deciding, knowing that -- if nothing else -- at least..
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Iain M. Banks |
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88c05da
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However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair." "What's that?" "A kind of glee. Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever - if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead - then one s..
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Iain M. Banks |
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e1283f6
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One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.
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philosophy
cognitive-dissonance
confirmation-bias
foreigners
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Iain M. Banks |
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f7b9938
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Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.
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Iain M. Banks |
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33c69a6
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The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.
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Iain M. Banks |
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4b590a7
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Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
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Iain M. Banks |
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4e1b18a
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An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.
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personality
spiritual
intelligence
physical
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Iain M. Banks |
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9e2b6fe
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They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws -- the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe -- break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist . . . special circumstances." She smiled. "That's us. That's our territory; our domain." "To some people," he said, "that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior."
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Iain M. Banks |
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45caefe
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There's a saying: 'War is a long cliff.' You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you're just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there's usually something you've missed -- a choice you didn't make -- that could have avoided invasio..
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Iain M. Banks |
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8d82f0f
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He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the ..
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fight-or-flight
instinct
human-nature
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Iain M. Banks |
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ea02e79
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Myself," said the drone sniffily, "I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water." --
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Iain M. Banks |
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2c8ce2c
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Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that's the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?
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Iain M. Banks |
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d76ef63
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Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of ..
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hyperspace
imagery
ocean
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Iain M. Banks |
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b7dc18e
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What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
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intelligence
feral
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Iain M. Banks |
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6bd7b43
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obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
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Iain M. Banks |
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15297b8
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I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
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insult
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Iain M. Banks |
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f9f419b
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Empires are synonymous with centralized--if occasionally schismatized--hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through--usually--a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser--as a rule nominally independent--power systems. In short, it's all about dominance.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ea4bbb4
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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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Iain M. Banks |
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f93f2b3
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This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called "Gurgeh." The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game."
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story
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Iain M. Banks |
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8bf2d54
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faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5908530
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Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It's just that there's no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c4d966c
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You'll run out of expletives soon; I'd advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys' strong point, has it?
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Iain M. Banks |
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976e9fb
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Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they're all - and he's quite convinced about this - they're all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or - for their own filthy left-wing reasons - deliberately trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their own interests everything would be fine, see? Level pla..
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do-gooders
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Iain M. Banks |
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2b970db
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We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future success. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.
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Iain M. Banks |