Quotes from work
Culture series

Iain Banks

The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks. The stories centre on the Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoids, aliens, and very advanced artificial intelligences living in socialist habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture in its plans to civilize the galaxy.

“A guilty system recognizes no innocents.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 “Imperium” (p. 215).
Context: A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.

“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 27).

“Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 20).

“The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him.
Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 3 “Machina Ex Machina” (p. 306).

“That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (p. 261).

““One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.” Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. “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; blind obedience would imply we are—ha!”—Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe—“no more than robots!””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 279).

“There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter V (p. 303).

“What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 23 (p. 371)

““So it’s false.”
“What isn’t?”
“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 “Culture Plate” (p. 5).

“Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 4 “Temple of Light” (p. 96).

““You’re a wicked man.”
“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Eleven (p. 355).

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

“One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 18 (p. 295)

“The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter V (p. 303).

““These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?”
“Believe me, it would be easy.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Twelve (p. 390).

“Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so (“Zakalwe,” she would say when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck and stare out from the rambunctious black tangle of her hair. “You have serious problems.””

Iain Banks Culture series

She would smile), But the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (pp. 144-145).