Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight. - Iain Banks

The war won't end," Aviger said. "It'll just die away...I don't think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they'll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won't give in, either; they'll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they've blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they'll destroy all of each other's big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody'll be living in single units blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet...and that's how it'll end; probably they'll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there'll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever's left of the galaxy, and there'll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.

Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.

Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder.