All Quotes by Iain Banks
“Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.”
“There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”
““Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’“It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.””
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”
“While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.”
“Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.”
“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”
“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.”
“Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.”
“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.”
““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.””
““So it’s false.”“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.””
“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.”
“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.”
““Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone. Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.”
““You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.””
““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!””
“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.”
““I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition.”
“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.”
“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.”
““I’m from out of town,” he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.”
““I think I know the real reason.”“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.””
“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.”
“What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.”
““Let’s waste a little time, hmm?” There was a long pause.”
““Well,” he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. “Here we are again.””
“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.”
“The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was. He could think of no more disastrous combination.”
“There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.”
“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?”
““You’re a wicked man.”“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.””
““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.””
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.”
“The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.”
“She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. “Is this as important as I think it is?”“Oh,” she said, “fuck.””
“Here, in the bare dark face of nightThe cloudings of our thought made clear”
“He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.”
“The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.”
“I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.”
“There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”
“He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.”
“Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.”
“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!”
“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.”
“That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.”
“How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.”
“The only sin is selfishness.”
“That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.”
“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.”
““Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.””
“No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!”
““See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.””
“Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.”
“You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.”
“Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”
““I believe in Providence, mistress.”“No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said.”
“Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.”
“Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician.”
“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.”
““I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.”“It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.””
““Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.””
“People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point.”
“We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others.”
““One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.””
“What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.”
“Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.”
“I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.”
“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.”
“We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.”
“The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.”
“Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?”
“Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves.”
““The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats...Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spend their existences attempting to conquer.””
“I’m supposed to be at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious at times. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that.”
““What, now?”“Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.””
“Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight.”
“Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?”
““Oh. I didn’t realise.”“Then you’re simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.””
““You serious?”“I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.””
““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 civilisationally.””
““Elated? Pleased?”“Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly.””
“Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.”
“Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?”
“Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.”
“When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy—~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with.”
“~ Want to know one ugly thought?~ One should always ask who has most to gain.”
““No, Geis, it doesn’t wear off. Like certain exotic diseases, and unlike love, synchroneurobonding is for life.”“As they say; ignorance pays.””
““Put plainly, I am not at liberty to divulge that information. There, it is said. Let us quickly move on from this unfortunate quantum of dissonance to the ground-state of accord which I trust will inform our future relationship.”“My dear lady,” the machine said, continuing to trundle after her. “Without saying so in so many words...correct.””
““How are you?”“There is no apart from that.””
““Anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry.”“Indeed. I can see contrition oozing from your every pore.””
“Perhaps it was simply bad luck, but despite the fact the sheer capability of the Guns ought to have ensured their owner could effectively become ruler of the entire system, the weapons had invariably been the downfall of whoever had come into possession of them.”
““Aah...Yes, and how does madam wish to pay?”She slapped her credit card on the counter. “Eventually.””
““He might come in useful,” Cenuij said.“Yeah,” Zefla said. “So’s a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.””
“When you have this sort of power, this responsibility, you can’t choose not to have it when the decisions become tough. You can’t afford to prevaricate or delegate; you have to be engaged. You can’t stay neutral; you can say you’re neutral, and try to act as though you are, but that neutrality will always help one side more than the other; that’s just the way power works...the leverage it exerts.”
““Details matter, though, don’t you think?” he said. “Sometimes what appear to be utterly inconsequential actions have the most enormous results. Chance makes the casual momentous. It is the fulcrum upon which the levers of action rest.””
“Allow me to attenuate my portentousness for you.”
““I think,” she said carefully, “that perhaps too many people want things to be simple when they are not and cannot be. Encouraging that desire is seductive and rewarding, but also dangerous.””
““Choice,” he said heavily. A small smile disturbed his face. “We all think we have so much of that, don’t we?””
“Is there anything I can do? Just tell me.I want you to destroy everything! she screamed. Every fucking thing. All the evil men and compliant women, all the armies and companies and cults and faiths and orders and every stupid fucker in them! All of them! EVERYTHING!”
“Hope could be more painful than despair.”
“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”