Consider Phlebas

Quotes

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

   p. 20

2. 

   “One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us—oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.

   “You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us—even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters—it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.”

   “Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?”

   “Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name...” The Idiran pondered. “...I believe they were called the...the Fanch.”

   “Never heard of them,” Aviger said.

   “No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”

   p. 445

3. 

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

   p. 27

4. 

   That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

   p. 32

5. 

   “The war won’t end,” Aviger said. “It’ll just die away...I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single units blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet...and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.”

   p. 380

6. 

   The underlying point held; 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.

   p. 96

7. 

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

   p. 96

8. 

   “Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza.

   “Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.”

   p. 102

That’s all the quotes.

8 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more