Top 90 Iain M. Banks Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.”

— Iain M. Banks

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “Chomba is seeking to redefine the term ‘precocious,’” Estray Lassils told Kabe, ruffling the child’s short blond curls.”

— Iain M. Banks

65. “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

66. “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

67. “The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.”

— Iain M. Banks

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

— Iain M. Banks

69. “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

70. “Division was the only order.”

— Iain M. Banks

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

86. “The only sin is selfishness.”

— Iain M. Banks

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

90. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job.”

— Iain M. Banks

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

— Iain M. Banks

92. “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

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

— Iain M. Banks

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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