185 quotes
Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up.
The Hydrogen Sonata (2013)
Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.
Look to Windward (2000)
When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy—
~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with.
Look to Windward (2000)
“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.”
“Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilisationally.”
Look to Windward (2000)
“See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.”
Inversions (1998)
The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.
Look to Windward (2000)
Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Excession (1996)
Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.
Surface Detail (2010)
I’m supposed to be at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious at times. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that.
Look to Windward (2000)
It is an insane conceit. Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy. Only people already riddled with the internalised special pleading and self-importance that too much power brings could even start to imagine that this might be in any way sustainable.
Transition (2009)
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.
Inversions (1998)
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.
Use of Weapons (1990)
Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.
Inversions (1998)
“So why are we bothering?”
“Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case it turns out to be something we should have bothered about. Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.”
The Hydrogen Sonata (2013)
~ Want to know one ugly thought?
~ Are there not enough in the world already?
~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.
~ If you say so.
~ One should always ask who has most to gain.
Look to Windward (2000)
Perhaps it was simply bad luck, but despite the fact the sheer capability of the Guns ought to have ensured their owner could effectively become ruler of the entire system, the weapons had invariably been the downfall of whoever had come into possession of them.
Against a Dark Background (1993)
How goes your peace conference?
Slowly. Having exhausted the possibilities of every other form of mass-murder they could possibly employ against each other, the natives now appear intent on boring each other to death. They may finally have discovered their true calling.
Matter (2008)
The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way around).
The Algebraist (2004)
Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly.
Well, let them die.
She’d compromise that far.
Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that.
Surface Detail (2010)
Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing – destroying nothing but Nothing – but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once.
Transition (2009)