Iain Banks Short Quotes

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

Iain Banks
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iain Banks
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?

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

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

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

Iain Banks
Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iain Banks
The youth was a cretin, and didn't even realize that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.

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The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

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

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

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

Iain Banks