Iain Banks

"We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes."

"The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability."

"Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?"

"Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves."

"“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.” Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”"

"“The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats...Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spend their existences attempting to conquer.”"

"I’m supposed to be at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious at times. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that."

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

"Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight."

"“The point is: what happens in heaven?” “Unknowable wonderfulness?” “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.” “Have you always thought that?” 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.” “There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being.” “That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic.” “And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe.” “Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong.” “There there are those who believe that the soul—” “Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That’s the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.”"

"Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?"

"“Oh. I didn’t realise.” “Then you’re simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.”"

"“You serious?” “I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”"

"“But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!” “Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.”"

"“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.” “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilisationally.”"

"“Elated? Pleased?” “Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly.”"

"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."

"Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?"

"Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do."

"There is an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it."

"When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy— ~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with."

"~ Want to know one ugly thought? ~ Are there not enough in the world already? ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them. ~ If you say so. ~ One should always ask who has most to gain."

"Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior, Choubris held."

"Holse had no idea how these things worked; he had never really bothered with religion, though he had always paid lip-service to the church for the sake of an easy life. He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege."

"“Fate, I tell you, if not the hand of the WorldGod itself…or whatever manipulatory appendage WorldGods possess. Anyway, the hand, metaphorically, of the WorldGod. Possibly.” “I think you underguess the workings of blind chance, sir.”"

"This version felt like the truth, she thought; close enough to the myths and legends of her own people, but less self-serving, less dramatically glorious, more equivocal in its moral implications."

"Ultimately the galaxy, indeed the sum of the universe in its entirety, was mostly nothing; average it all out and it made a pretty good vacuum. But within the foci of matter there were the systems, the stars and planets and habitats—what a cornucopia of life was there!"

"Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably—almost certainly—well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant but of much less distressing immediacy. Context was indeed all, as her father had always insisted, but the greater context she was learning about acted to shrink the vast-seeming scale of the Eighth Level of Sursamen and all its wars, politics, disputes, struggles, tribulations and vexations until it all looked very far away and trivial indeed."

"Had they felt righteous, believing that the justice of their cause was being recognized by higher powers? For no doubt that was how they did think. It seemed to tyl Loesp everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true. They were all of them fools. There was no right and wrong, there was simply effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility. That he knew this was his advantage, but it was one of better understanding, not moral superiority—he had no delusions there."

"Ideas about what happened after you died varied even among the priestly cast. Primitives were able to have more straightforward religions because they didn’t know any better. Once you knew even a little of the reality of the situation in the outside universe, it all got a bit more complex: there were lots of aliens and they all had—or had once had—their own myths and religions. Some aliens were immortal; some had constructed their own fully functional afterlives, where the deceased—recorded, transcribed—ended up after death; some had made thinking machines that had their own sets of imponderable and semi-godlike powers; some just were gods, like the WorldGod, for example, and some had Sublimed, which itself was arguably a form of ascension to Godhead."

"Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution. A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever."

"Most men—most women, too, no doubt—lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high. In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it."

"“The source of my name,” the vehicle had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ’One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”"

"Really we’re no better—you’re no better—than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place."

"On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control. Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime, he’d held."

"Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries."

"I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation."

"How goes your peace conference? Slowly. Having exhausted the possibilities of every other form of mass-murder they could possibly employ against each other, the natives now appear intent on boring each other to death. They may finally have discovered their true calling."

"We’ve filled the known universe with credulous idiots and we think we’ve sneakily contributed to our own safety by making it hard for anything untoward to creep in under our sensor coverage whereas in fact we’ve just made sure we harvest zillions of false positives and probably made the really serious shit harder to spot when it does eventually come flying."

"But are we within likelihood? Batra asked. Are we even still within the realm of anything other than paranoid lunacy?"

"He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion."

"He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You live there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.” “Well, for me it is—was—just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occurred. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”"

"Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgment to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words."

"It seemed at first glance like utter madness, yet it also, when one thought about it, appeared somehow no less implausible than any other explanation of how things truly were, and it had a sort of completeness about it that stifled argument. Assuming that every branching fork on the Universe map was taken randomly, all would still somehow be well; the likely things would always outnumber the unlikely and vastly outnumber the ludicrous, so as a rule things would happen much as one expected, with the occasional surprise and the very rare moment of utter incredulity. Pretty much as life generally was, in other words, in his experience. This was at once oddly satisfactory, mildly disappointing and strangely reassuring to Holse; fate was as fate was, and that was it. He immediately wondered how you could cheat."

"“Well, it all sounds most unpleasant,” Droffo said. He shook his head. “You hear all sorts of ridiculous stories; the workers are full of them. Too much drink, too little learning.” “No, more than that, sir,” Neguste told him. “These are facts.” “I think I might dispute that,” Droffo said. “All the same, sir, facts is facts. That itself’s a fact.”"

"He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behavior in some other field. Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, the rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse."

"A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?"

"I was toying with the idea of having to give up writing SF in the relatively near future, not because I wanted to but because I felt I’d have to. I think you get fewer ideas as you get older, and even though you get better at using and developing the few you do have, that’s not enough. Written SF relies heavily on ideas—you can write a perfectly good mainstream novel with no original ideas at all; you just have to tell an interesting story with interesting characters who have something to say. I don’t mean that as a criticism either: that encompasses perfectly valid, rich, and rewarding literary forms, but you can’t get away with that in science fiction. You have to have completely new ideas in there somewhere or it doesn’t really cut it as proper SF, and I was concerned about that."

"I think that humanity is just too tied up with the physical, anchored into the setting, if you like; who you are is actually about your entire position within the world you inhabit. Consciousness is like an abstract of that framework, it’s not just the bit in your head. AIs, yes; almost a given. I find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can’t have machines that exhibit consciousness; it’s a weird attitude unless you subscribe to the superstition that you have to have a supernatural soul to exhibit consciousness. Saying that the material world is incapable of forming a substrate for sentience or intelligence seems nonsense to me. We, as human beings, are made up of matter, and we exhibit intelligence (well… but anyway). We start from nothing bigger than a sperm and an egg, after all, and then just have lots more matter added. It’s astonishing and wonderful, and we in a sense, rightly talk about the miracle of birth. But for goodness’ sake, ultimately it’s just evolution and applied biochemistry. I believe matter can provide a home for consciousness—it seems perverse to argue that only biology is capable of this."

"It’s as if I drifted into this situation. I didn’t ever think about fighting or doing anything risky at all, not until the war came along. I agreed it was necessary, but that seemed obvious; everybody thought so, everybody I knew, anyway. And volunteering, agreeing to take part; that too seemed... natural. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me that it might entail privation and suffering. Am I as stupid as those throughout history—those I’ve always despised and pitied—who’ve marched off to war, heads full of noble notions and expectations of easy glory, only to die screaming and torn in the mud?"