# The State Of The Art

- Author: [Iain M. Banks](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks.md)
- Quotes: 18
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-state-of-the-art

## Quotes

> I looked at Li. “An argument? All right; you—anybody—taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human... maybe even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over.”
>
> “But why should it command itself? We made it; it didn’t make us.”
>
> “So? And anyway we didn’t make it; other machines made it... and even they only started it off; it mostly made itself. But anyway, you’d have to go back... I don’t know how many thousand generations of its ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors. Even if this mythical ‘we’ had built it, it’s still zillions of times smarter than we are. Would you let an ant tell you what to do?”
>
> “Bacterium? Flea? Ant? Make up your mind.”
>
> “Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man.”
>
> “But we started all this; if it hadn’t been for us—”
>
> “And who started us? Some glop of goo on another rockball? A supernova? The big bang? What’s starting something got to do with it?”
>
> “You don’t think I’m serious, do you?”
>
> “More terminal than serious.”

p. 126

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

p. 40

> We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.

p. 47

> An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.

p. 112

> And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet...
>
> Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.

p. 75

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

p. 128

> I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.

p. 94

> Of course they aren’t ready for it, of course we’ll spoil the place. Are they any more ready for World War Three? You seriously think we could mess the place up more than they’re doing at the moment? When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo... or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land. They could hardly make a better job of vandalizing their own planet if we gave them lessons.

p. 84

> Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

p. 75

> 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?

p. 40

> 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.

p. 46

> “Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’
>
> “If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.
>
> “You know; living. Is it worth all the... bother?”
>
> “No.”
>
> “No?”
>
> “No, I don’t ever wonder about it.”
>
> “Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.
>
> “I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.”
>
> “Not important?”
>
> “It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”

p. 44

> On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system, which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.

p. 136

> It is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. Thus, while it takes Soviet Russia a vast amount of time and hard work to produce one inspired lunatic like Lysenko, the West can so arrange things that even the dullest farmer can see it makes more sense to burn his grain, melt his butter, and wash away the remains of his pulped vegetables with his tanks of unused wine than it does to actually sell the stuff to be consumed.
>
> And note that even if this mythical yokel did decide to sell the stuff, or even give it away—the Earthers have an even more devastating trick they can perform; they show you that those foods aren’t even needed anyway! They wouldn’t feed the least productive, most unimportant untouchable from Pradesh, tribesperson from Darfur, or peon from Rio Branco! The Earth has more than enough to feed all its inhabitants every day already! A truth so seemingly world-shattering one wonders that the oppressed of Earth don’t rise up in flames and anger yesterday! But they don’t, because they are so infected with the myth of self-interested advancement, or the poison of religion acceptance, they either only want to make their own way up the pile so they can shit upon everybody else, or actually feel grateful for the attention when their so-called betters shit on them!
>
> It is my contention that this is either an example of the most formidable and blissfully arrogant use of power and existing advantage... or scarcely credible stupidity.

p. 137

> While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

p. 169

> It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.

p. 74

> All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind.

p. 168

> “Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.”
>
> “So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in... science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as... worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?”

p. 73