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The State of the Art (Culture, #4) QUOTES

The State of the Art (Culture, #4) QUOTES

1 " You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light! "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

2 " Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

3 " 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 , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

4 " That’s what we’ve lost, you know. What you’ve lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and . . . sin. These people know there are still things they don’t know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

5 " On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, 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. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

6 " Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

7 " It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

8 " Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

9 " Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

10 " Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

11 " [T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional clichés, the most familiar and received nonsense. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

12 " Money is a sign of poverty. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

13 " 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 , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

14 " Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

15 " When in Rome; burn it. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

16 " Their history wasn’t so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless occasions when all any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and humanely concerned observer would have wanted to do was scream in despair. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

17 " It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for ‘genuine’ feelings, ‘real’ emotion, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

18 " Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn’t mean that it didn’t actually happen. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

19 " 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 , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

20 " Three; - and this would be sufficient reason by itself - what are we supposed to be about, Sma? What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarrassed about talking about it? Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but - in the end - just because it is so hard to pin down and express, a freedom of a far higher quality than anything to be found on any relevant scale on the planet beneath us at the moment. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)