Top 90 Iain M. Banks Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “When in Rome; burn it.”

— Iain M. Banks

2. “One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.”

— Iain M. Banks

4. “Myself,” said the drone sniffily, “I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.”

— Iain M. Banks

5. “Collective responsibility. Also known as sharing the blame.”

— Iain M. Banks

6. “I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.”

— Iain M. Banks

7. “The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.”

— Iain M. Banks

8. “You might call them soft, because they’re very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they’re soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.”

— Iain M. Banks

9. “All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change.”

— Iain M. Banks

10. “He would give up then and console himself with something she’d said. That you could not love what you fully understood. “Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered”.”

— Iain M. Banks

11. “Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”

— Iain M. Banks

12. “He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.”

— Iain M. Banks

13. “A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.”

— Iain M. Banks

14. “What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?”

— Iain M. Banks

15. “Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.”

— Iain M. Banks

16. “You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.”

— Iain M. Banks

17. “Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.”

— Iain M. Banks

18. “Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.”

— Iain M. Banks

19. “I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life – boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.”

— Iain M. Banks

20. “Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.”

— Iain M. Banks

21. “My name,’ she said. ‘Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.”

— Iain M. Banks

22. “I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”

— Iain M. Banks

23. “The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.”

— Iain M. Banks

24. “It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.” “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.”

— Iain M. Banks

25. “Sometimes I start to think I’m repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing’s worth playing for anyway.”

— Iain M. Banks

26. “It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature” – the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural.”

— Iain M. Banks

27. “An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power – or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness – a similar distinction?”

— Iain M. Banks

28. “The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!”

— Iain M. Banks

29. “To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast.”

— Iain M. Banks

30. “Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.”

— Iain M. Banks

31. “The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.”

— Iain M. Banks

32. “The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking’s immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.”

— Iain M. Banks

33. “A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.”

— Iain M. Banks

34. “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.”

— Iain M. Banks

35. “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.”

— Iain M. Banks

36. “To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.”

— Iain M. Banks

37. “You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.”

— Iain M. Banks

38. “Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans.”

— Iain M. Banks

39. “The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.”

— Iain M. Banks

40. “All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.”

— Iain M. Banks

41. “Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.”

— Iain M. Banks

42. “The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.”

— Iain M. Banks

43. “The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.”

— Iain M. Banks

44. “If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.”

— Iain M. Banks

45. “This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.”

— Iain M. Banks

46. “Thing about emergencies,” he said, sounding weary. “Rarely occur when they’d be convenient.”

— Iain M. Banks

47. “The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.” The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. “How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”.”

— Iain M. Banks

48. “Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.”

— Iain M. Banks

49. “And in all of this, to what end?” “No end save itself: I pass the time to pass the time, and stay involved to stay involved.” “Yes, but why?” “Why not?”

— Iain M. Banks

50. “But if you’re God,” Sharrow said to Elson Roa, “why do you need the others?” “What others?” Roa said. Sharrow looked exasperated. “Oh, come on.” Elson Roa shrugged. “My apparences? They are the sign that my will is not yet strong enough to support my existence without extraneous help. I am working on this.”

— Iain M. Banks