What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories o… - Iain Banks

On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control. Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime, he’d held.

“I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.”
“It would be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her.

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.