Home > Work > Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1) QUOTES

Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1) QUOTES

1 " Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you? "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

2 " That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

3 " 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 , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

4 " Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

5 " Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

6 " Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

7 " I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

8 " Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot, "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

9 " He could not believe that ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Mind’s idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

10 " …[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

11 " 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 , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

12 " 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 , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

13 " Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

14 " The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

15 " Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

16 " The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

17 " The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

18 " It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

19 " He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

20 " Look, Horza,” Yalson said, turning to him, “when you come on board this ship you don’t have a past. It’s considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they’ve done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we’ve all got some secrets, or we just don’t want to talk or think about some of the things we’ve done, or some of the things we’ve had done to us. But either way, don’t try to find out. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you’ll ever get any privacy, so make the most of it. If you live long enough, maybe somebody will want to tell you all about themselves—eventually, probably when they’re drunk… but by that time you may not want them to. Whatever; my advice is just to leave it for the moment. "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)