Iain Banks Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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
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
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Iain Banks
I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

Iain Banks
I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

Iain Banks
The truth is not always useful, not always good. It's like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.

Iain Banks
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
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.

Iain Banks
There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Iain Banks
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

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
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
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.

Iain Banks
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
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
Sorrow be damned and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

Iain Banks
He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.
He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight.

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
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

Iain Banks
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.

Iain Banks
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,

Iain Banks
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

Iain Banks
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
You like music, Mr. Gurgeh? Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. Well, a little does no harm.

Iain Banks
Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

Iain Banks
And I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.

Iain Banks
So it's false.
What isn't?
Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

Iain Banks
"What, now?" "Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy."

Iain Banks