“In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Thirteen (p. 434).
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Iain Banks 139
Scottish writer 1954–2013Related quotes

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 33
Context: Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29th, 1925), The Impossible Mencken
1920s

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

Source: Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Kesey's Garage Sale (1973)
"On the Modern Element in Modern Literature," Partisan Review (January/February 1961); reprinted as "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Beyond Culture (1965)
Context: A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.

As quoted in "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq" at History News Network (26 September 2002)

“Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends? It's just an observation.”
Source: I Am the Messenger

The Opening to the Future http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/01/20/06-08-1964.pdf (1964)
Context: To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.