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Iain Banks
306 quotes
“The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion,…It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact—according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes—be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilisations…. However, everybody—well, virtually everybody, obviously—quickly or eventually came around to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn’t a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody seemed to live as though things were always just about to get better, as though any bad times were just about to end, any time now, but they were usually wrong. Life ground on. Sometimes to the good, but often towards ill and always in the direction of death. Yet people acted as though death was just the biggest surprise—My, who put that there? Maybe that was the right way to treat it, of course. Maybe the sensible attitude was to act as though there had been nothing before one came to consciousness, and nothing would exist after one’s death, as though the whole universe was built around one’s own individual awareness. It was a working hypothesis, a useful half-truth.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I first encountered her near the beginning of that golden age which nobody noticed was happening at the time; I mean the long decade between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. If you wish to be pedantically exact about it, those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of America of September 11, 2001. One event symbolised the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is one reason that extremely wise, intelligent and knowledgeable people like myself bother to teach unutterably ignorant and callow people like yourselves when we could be happily feet-up in front of a big log fire reading a book, or talking urbanely amongst ourselves about the latest exciting idea or faculty gossip. There is, despite all the many, many appearances to the contrary, just a sliver of a chance that one of the better minds in this class might answer one of the questions that no one of my generation – despite the aforesaid wisdom, intelligence, et cetera – or any previous generation has been able to answer definitively.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Madame d’Ortolan is one of those people – civilised on the surface, brutish underneath – who think themselves realists when they contemplate their own barbarism, and ascribe the same callousness to others. Making the assumption that everybody else is as ruthless as she is helps her live with her own inhumanity, though she would justify it as simple prudence. She knows how she would deal with somebody like herself: she’d kill them. So she assumes those who oppose her must be planning the same, or shortly will. Obviously, then, by her demented logic, she needs to kill them before they kill her. She will think through this psychotic escalation without any evidence that her opponents actually do intend her harm and she’ll pride herself on her disinterested practicality, probably even persuading herself that she bears those she has marked for death no personal ill will. It’s just politics.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source