Iain Banks Quotes

The great mass of 18-year olds ... are given no choice.... The older generation immolates the younger, on the alter of Moloch ]. What God, centuries ago, forbade Abraham to do even to his own son,—"Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him" [Genesis 22:12]—this we do by decree to the entire youth of a nation.

The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.

Morality binds and blinds.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.

Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

The popularity of punk rock was, in effect, due to the fact that it made ugliness beautiful.

The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.

Napoleon is always right.

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.

All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it.

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

The truth is rarely true and never simple.

It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.

A servile race Who, in mere want of fault, all merit place; Who blind obedience pay to ancient schools, Bigots to Greece, and slaves to musty rules.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simple are

The fact that we are born with the potential to go from simple survival to God-consciousness is the remarkable trait that sets our nervous systems apart from all other creatures. How to Know God.