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...
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
Then there’s nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREE
Though. Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here—you’ll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up—thought it was a pity there was...
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...
There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capi...
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...
Which would you rather have, Lattens?’ UrLeyn asked his son. ‘Good giants and monsters, or bad ones?’ ‘Bad ones!’ Lattens shouted. He drew his wooden sword from its scabbard. ‘So I can cut their heads...
You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.
To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The w...
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...
The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental l...
Genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.
The only sin is selfishness.
It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part i...
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incid...
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