Quotes from banks iain m iii

Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.

An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.

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

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

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.

That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.

There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

I've been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I've decided it's wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it.

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.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.

The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

And us? Just another belch in the darkness. Sound but not word, noise without meaning.

I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.

Only ceremony and the love of fate distinguish us from the beasts.

She felt herself as the speck she was: a mote, a tiny struggling imperfect chip of life, lost in the surrounding waste of light and space.

You never risked everything; you risked as little as possible. You sold the idea of risking everything to the sort of idiot who thought that was how you got rich, but you kept your own risks to an absolute minimum. That way if you did make a mistake--and everybody made mistakes, or they weren't really trying--it didn't finish you. Let others ruin themselves--there were always rich pickings in the wreckage--but don't ever risk too much yourself.

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?