Iain Banks Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.

Iain Banks
Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

Iain Banks
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

Iain 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 Banks
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.

Iain 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. 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.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
You're a wicked man.
Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.

Iain Banks
I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloom-stream outnumber the neutrons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.

Iain Banks
Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.

Iain Banks
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

Iain Banks
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

Iain Banks
Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.

Iain Banks
Is all this serious? Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.
Deadly serious, Flere-Imsaho told him.
Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.

Iain Banks
I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.

Iain Banks
They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can't trust them.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.

Iain Banks
Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.

Iain Banks
-"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar's obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?" -"Well, first, I didn't cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain 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 Banks
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.

Iain Banks
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully 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.

Iain Banks
Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.

Iain 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 Banks
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.

Iain Banks
One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

Iain Banks