Iain Banks Quotes

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

… a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind.

To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.

What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

The only time the white man is brotherly toward you is when he can use you, when he can exploit you, when he will oppress you, when you will submit to him.

Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.

The second class of evils comprises such evils as people cause to each other, when, e.g. , some of them use their strength against others. These evils are more numerous than those of the first kind... they likewise originate in ourselves, though the sufferer himself cannot avert them.

Arriane sized her up, tapping one finger against her lips. "Perfect," she said, stepping forward to loop her arm through Luce's. "I was just thinking I could really use a new slave.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

To subjugate another is to subjugate yourself.

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with