Iain Banks Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

Iain Banks
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
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
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
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
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
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
Pity they didn't devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.

Iain Banks
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
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
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.

Iain Banks
The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

Iain Banks
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
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.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.

Iain Banks
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

Iain Banks
I'm very sorry, the drone said, without a trace of contrition.

Iain Banks
Tishlin's dubious look indicated he wasn't totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.

Iain Banks
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
How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.

Iain Banks
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