Zakalwe, 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...
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!
Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s...
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
All was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
There has seldom if ever 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 t...
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...
The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I’d say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises...
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREE
High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire’s treasure, and he sitting by a log fire with a sad and lovely princess. . ....
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
The bomb lives only as it is falling.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of s...
Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they're all - and he's quite convinced about this - they're all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving basta...
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happ...
I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded b...
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.