Iain M. Banks

Quotes

“Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.
“Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him.
Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
p. 225
The Player Of Games
“I think I know the real reason.”
“Which is?”
“Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. “Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. “Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.”
p. 148
Use Of Weapons
Empires are synonymous with centralized — if occasionally schismatized — hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through — usually — a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser — as a rule nominally independent — power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.
p. 91
The Player Of Games
The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.
p. 50
Use Of Weapons
“Well,” he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. “Here we are again.”
p. 178
Use Of Weapons
“You’re a wicked man.”
“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.”
p. 355
Use Of Weapons
“So it’s false.”
“What isn’t?”
“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”
p. 5
The Player Of Games
A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.
p. 215
The Player Of Games
“You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.”
p. 277
The Player Of Games
The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.
p. 303
Use Of Weapons
What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
p. 316
Use Of Weapons
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
p. 303
Use Of Weapons