Scottish author (1954-2013)
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Use of Weapons
We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.
We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.
We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] ... really, it's not about you.
IAIN M. BANKS
"Iain Banks: The Final Interview,", The Guardian, June 14, 2013
Pity they didn't devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Algebraist
The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
This lot'll tell you anything is natural; they'll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who's another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that's natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks ... Sh*t, they’re so convinced about what's natural it's the more sophisticated ones that'll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can't have pleasure and goodness. They'll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what's natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and f*ck everybody else. They're no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it's cruder.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
Only ceremony and the love of fate distinguish us from the beasts.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art