My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always...
Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, especially when I’m being tempted to do something I know I shouldn’t, and there’s money involved (when is ther...
Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and jus...
It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The g...
Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier’s annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning...
Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through...
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,
Don’t you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival.
Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in reco...
Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored sta...
But if you’re God, Sharrow said to Elson Roa, why do you need the others? What others? Roa said. Sharrow looked exasperated. Oh, come on. Elson Roa shrugged. My apparences? They are the sign that my w...
All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself
All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
Then what, Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, is making you smile about a disaster?-Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do wi...
Now he realized… now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance…