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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
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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
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You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Iain Banks
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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
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I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Iain Banks
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I'm very sorry, the drone said, without a trace of contrition.
Iain Banks
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Tishlin's dubious look indicated he wasn't totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.
Iain Banks
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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
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How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.
Iain Banks
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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You're a wicked man.
Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.
Iain Banks
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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
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Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.
Iain Banks
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
Iain Banks
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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
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Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.
Iain Banks
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Iain Banks
Creative Commons
Born:
February 16, 1954
Died:
June 9, 2013
(aged 59)
Bio:
Iain Banks was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies.
Known for:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
Use of Weapons (1990)
The Wasp Factory (1984)
The Player of Games (1988)
Excession (1996)
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