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Iain Banks
306 quotes
“There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’ “If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again. “You know; living. Is it worth all the... bother?” “No.” “No?” “No, I don’t ever wonder about it.” “Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath. “I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.” “Not important?” “It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.” “So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in... science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as... worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course they aren’t ready for it, of course we’ll spoil the place. Are they any more ready for World War Three? You seriously think we could mess the place up more than they’re doing at the moment? When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo... or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land. They could hardly make a better job of vandalizing their own planet if we gave them lessons.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So it’s false.” “What isn’t?” “Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone. “Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him. Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him. Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass? Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knew in his heart that there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right, and in the working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood; better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m from out of town,” he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s waste a little time, hmm?” “A nice euphemism, sir,” she mused distantly. He smiled. “Come and help me think of better ones.” She smiled and they both looked at each other. There was a long pause.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well,” he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. “Here we are again.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was. He could think of no more disastrous combination.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re a wicked man.” “Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?” “Believe me, it would be easy.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. “Is this as important as I think it is?” “Almost certainly much more so.” “Oh,” she said, “fuck.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source