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the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works. -- Iain M. Banks
then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are. -- Iain M. Banks
Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination. -- Iain M. Banks
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess. -- Iain M. Banks
First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich' it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly which replied. It looked up and said, 'Sorry, as I was saying: I come in peace -- Iain M. Banks
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness. -- Iain M. Banks
So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?"
"Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants. -- Iain M. Banks
It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn't, even though Jase had suggested it. That was too easy. Being here wouldn't have meant anything. -- Iain M. Banks
the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With -- Iain M. Banks
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky. -- Iain M. Banks
I don't need a tie for gravitas. -- Iain M. Banks
He wasn't sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods. -- Iain M. Banks
[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing. -- Iain M. Banks
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made. -- Iain M. Banks
There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery. -- Iain M. Banks
It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally. -- Iain M. 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 M. Banks
You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be. -- Iain M. Banks
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 the rules. -- Iain M. Banks
Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print. -- Iain M. Banks
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? -- Iain M. Banks
The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams. -- Iain M. Banks
Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. -- Iain M. Banks
The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who -- Iain M. Banks
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season. -- Iain M. Banks
The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion. -- Iain M. Banks
[M]aking a show was better cover than trying to stay inconspicuous; Western capitalism in particular allowed the rich just about the right amount of behavioural leeway to account for the oddities our alienness might produce. -- Iain M. Banks
Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness. -- Iain M. Banks
Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening. -- Iain M. Banks
had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment, -- Iain M. Banks
And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems. -- Iain M. Banks
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss ... to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now. -- Iain M. Banks
A guilty system recognizes no innocents. -- Iain M. Banks
The Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond. -- Iain M. Banks
Like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens ... -- Iain M. Banks
A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. 'Cheradenine?' the voice said again. Trying to get him to wake up. But he was awake. He tried moving his lips. -- Iain M. Banks
[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success -- Iain M. Banks
I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering. -- Iain M. Banks
You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn't, you could still find out a lot. -- Iain M. Banks
But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her. -- Iain M. Banks
All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it. Finally -- Iain M. Banks
Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not. -- Iain M. Banks
I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle -- Iain M. Banks
It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation. -- Iain M. Banks
He felt the slowly healing polarization of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him. -- Iain M. Banks
Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed. -- Iain M. Banks
no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out . . . That -- Iain M. Banks
They left Puonvangi at the 303rd in the company of a riotous party of Binlisi conventioneers. The Birilisi were an avian species and much given to excessive narcoticism; they and Puonvangi were guaranteed to get on. There was much fluttering. -- Iain M. Banks
He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking! -- Iain M. Banks
His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain. -- Iain M. Banks
[I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you. -- Iain M. Banks
How about," Yay said, "magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn't that sound more exciting? -- Iain M. Banks
The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir. -- Iain M. Banks
She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes. -- Iain M. Banks
We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused. -- Iain M. Banks
Now he realized ... now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance ... -- Iain M. Banks
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. -- Iain M. Banks
You'll run out of expletives soon; I'd advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys' strong point, has it? -- Iain M. Banks
It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The -- Iain M. Banks
Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right. -- Iain M. Banks
The game's the thing. That's the conventional wisdom, isn't it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with. -- Iain M. Banks
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. -- Iain M. Banks
Neeporlax presented something of a contrast. -- Iain M. Banks
So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we're doing the right thing? How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God? -- Iain M. Banks
Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing. -- Iain M. Banks
Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best. -- Iain M. Banks
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me! -- Iain M. Banks
5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas. -- Iain M. Banks
One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius. -- Iain M. Banks
One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve. -- Iain M. Banks
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever. -- Iain M. Banks
And in all of this, to what end?" "No end save itself: I pass the time to pass the time, and stay involved to stay involved." "Yes, but why?" "Why not? -- Iain M. Banks
One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher. -- Iain M. Banks
All food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. -- Iain M. Banks
Individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore. -- Iain M. Banks
Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation. -- Iain M. Banks
Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction. -- Iain M. Banks
Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity. -- Iain M. Banks
If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it. -- Iain M. Banks
Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else, -- Iain M. Banks
He might come in useful.'
'Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head. -- Iain M. Banks
Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves -- Iain M. Banks
Faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence. -- Iain M. Banks
But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion. -- Iain M. Banks
I'm a fucking starship; I'm allowed to cheat. -- Iain M. Banks
Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It's -- Iain M. Banks
The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters. -- Iain M. Banks
All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning. -- Iain M. Banks
Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition? -- Iain M. Banks
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion. -- Iain M. Banks
Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad. -- Iain M. Banks
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. -- Iain M. Banks
Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. -- Iain M. Banks
It was a beautiful voice. He wanted to reply to it. But he couldn't work out how to. It was very dark. 'Cheradenine?' A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. 'Cheradenine?' the voice said again. -- Iain M. Banks
I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered. -- Iain M. Banks
[A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past. -- Iain M. Banks
A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why. -- Iain M. Banks
Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly. -- Iain M. Banks
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. -- Iain M. Banks
Myself," said the drone sniffily, "I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water. -- Iain M. Banks
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
She laughed. 'Really?'
The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves. -- Iain M. Banks
Holse wasn't about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do. -- Iain M. Banks
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get. -- Iain M. Banks
He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense. -- Iain M. Banks
Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter. -- Iain M. Banks
That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He -- Iain M. Banks
The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively. -- Iain M. Banks
bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform -- Iain M. Banks
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?
It would be appropriate.
When in Rome; burn it. -- Iain M. Banks
An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality. -- Iain M. Banks
I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment. -- Iain M. Banks
Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen. -- Iain M. Banks
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. -- Iain M. Banks
Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness. -- Iain M. Banks
That's what we've lost, you know. What you've lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and ... sin. These people know there are still things they don't know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong. -- Iain M. Banks
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones. -- Iain M. Banks
A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being. -- Iain M. Banks
Escape is a commodity like anything else. -- Iain M. Banks
Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away. -- Iain M. Banks
But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . . -- Iain M. Banks
It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people. -- Iain M. Banks
Division was the only order. -- Iain M. Banks
The History Of The Universe In Three Words
CHAPTER ONE
Bang!
CHAPTER TWO
sssss
CHAPTER THREE
crunch.
THE END -- Iain M. Banks
When in Rome; burn it. -- Iain M. Banks
This isn't Ospin! These aren't the Dataversities! -- Iain M. Banks
To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast. -- Iain M. Banks
They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement ... -- Iain M. Banks
They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists. -- Iain M. Banks
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". -- Iain M. Banks
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. -- Iain M. Banks
The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces. -- Iain M. Banks
Money is a sign of poverty. -- Iain M. Banks
It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. -- Iain M. Banks
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit. -- Iain M. Banks
But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be. -- Iain M. Banks
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered. -- Iain M. Banks
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it. -- Iain M. Banks
It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called "human nature" - the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural -- Iain M. Banks
The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so. -- Iain M. Banks
I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch. -- Iain M. Banks
it was the night when people got paid and didn't have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then -- Iain M. Banks
You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything. -- Iain M. Banks
Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway. -- Iain M. Banks
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it. -- Iain M. Banks
The bomb lives only as it is falling. -- Iain M. Banks
Bob-nodded toward the open module door. After you. -- Iain M. Banks
just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down. -- Iain M. Banks
The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously. -- Iain M. Banks
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it. -- Iain M. Banks
one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In -- Iain M. Banks
Thing about emergencies," he said, sounding weary. "Rarely occur when they'd be convenient. -- Iain M. Banks
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. -- Iain M. Banks