Quotes from Iain M. Banks

In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

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

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

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

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

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

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.

What was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers.

Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

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

We are a race prone to monsters ... and when we produce one we worship it.

There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else's ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.

Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

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

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

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.

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.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

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

After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.

Escape is a commodity like anything else