Top 90 Iain M. Banks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Empire had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be tolerated.”

— Iain M. Banks

52. “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

53. “The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.”

— Iain M. Banks

54. “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

55. “Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.”

— Iain M. Banks

56. “You’ll run out of expletives soon; I’d advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys’ strong point, has it?”

— Iain M. Banks

57. “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

58. “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.”

— Iain M. Banks

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

— Iain M. Banks

60. “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, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word.”

— Iain M. Banks

61. “We are what we do, not what we think.”

— Iain M. Banks

62. “I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle.”

— Iain M. Banks

63. “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

64. “Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.”

— Iain M. Banks

65. “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.”

— Iain M. Banks

66. “So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we’re doing the right thing? How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?”

— Iain M. Banks

67. “He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The game changed.”

— Iain M. Banks

68. “He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.”

— Iain M. Banks

69. “Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.”

— Iain M. Banks

70. “In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.”

— Iain M. Banks

71. “They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement...”

— Iain M. Banks

72. “I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.”

— Iain M. Banks

73. “The Empire wanted to survive; it was like an animal, a massive, powerful body that would only let certain cells or viruses survive within it and as a matter of course killed off any and all others, automatically and unthinkingly.”

— Iain M. Banks

74. “I have a whole regimental intelligence service that’s developed a fine line in rumour-mongering and story-placing over the last few years, and the ear of every media player you’ve courted so assiduously over the decades; they will ask the questions we’ve suggested, they will listen, and they will repeat what we tell them. The issue is whether people believe it.”

— Iain M. Banks

75. “The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.”

— Iain M. Banks

76. “Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.”

— Iain M. Banks

77. “The Dwellers are not going to be happy. Only they’re allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere. And it isn’t even fireworks season.”

— Iain M. Banks

78. “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.”

— Iain M. Banks

79. “Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.”

— Iain M. Banks

80. “One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”

— Iain M. Banks

81. “That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.”

— Iain M. Banks

82. “Ah, we’re the infection, Sma.’ He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. ‘We’re the ones who’re different, we’re the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we’re just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They’re real because they live the way they have to. We aren’t because we live the way we want to.”

— Iain M. Banks

83. “Holse wasn’t about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.”

— Iain M. Banks

84. “He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.”

— Iain M. Banks

85. “Division was the only order.”

— Iain M. Banks

86. “Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.”

— Iain M. Banks

87. “There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.”

— Iain M. Banks

88. “The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.”

— Iain M. Banks

89. “All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.”

— Iain M. Banks

90. “Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.”

— Iain M. Banks

91. “Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably – almost certainly – well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy.”

— Iain M. Banks

92. “You judged your own attractiveness – physically, psychologically and in terms of status – then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with the possibility of advancement, or settling for a more reliably stable life but never knowing what you might have achieved.”

— Iain M. Banks

93. “Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.”

— Iain M. Banks

94. “The only sin is selfishness.”

— Iain M. Banks

95. “Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.”

— Iain M. Banks

96. “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

97. “It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.”

— Iain M. Banks