Iain Banks quotes

You're a wicked man.” "Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice. (Iain Banks)
Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.
Iain Banks
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.
Iain Banks
Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight -We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear.
Iain Banks
I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
Iain Banks
If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
Iain Banks
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
Iain Banks
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
Iain Banks
By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
Iain Banks
One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.” Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. "Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are-ha!”-Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe-"no more than robots!
Iain Banks
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation. (Iain Banks)
You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm.
Iain Banks
Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.
Iain Banks
Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
Iain Banks
Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Iain Banks
That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
Iain Banks
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Iain Banks
I think I know the real reason.” "Which is?” "Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.
Iain Banks
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.
Iain Banks
What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do? (Iain Banks)
It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then 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.
Iain Banks
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place-and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all-so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.
Iain Banks
I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
Iain Banks
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
Iain Banks