Iain Banks Quotes

Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves

The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was. He could think of no more disastrous combination.

Really we’re no better—you’re no better—than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place.

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.

Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.

Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.

"But what if someone kills somebody else?"
Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned."
"Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?"
"Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again."
"Is that all?"
"What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties."
"Ah; but in your Culture, can't you gatecrash?"
"I suppose so," Gurgeh conceded. "But nobody'd talk to you."

A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably—almost certainly—well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant but of much less distressing immediacy. Context was indeed all, as her father had always insisted, but the greater context she was learning about acted to shrink the vast-seeming scale of the Eighth Level of Sursamen and all its wars, politics, disputes, struggles, tribulations and vexations until it all looked very far away and trivial indeed.

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed 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 perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

Oh. I didn't realise."
"Then you're simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.

And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?

When you have this sort of power, this responsibility, you can’t choose not to have it when the decisions become tough. You can’t afford to prevaricate or delegate; you have to be engaged. You can’t stay neutral; you can say you’re neutral, and try to act as though you are, but that neutrality will always help one side more than the other; that’s just the way power works...the leverage it exerts.

Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.