[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it reall...
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...
Then there’s nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
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.
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...
The Colonel talked into the mike near his shoulder again.
Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn’t mean that it didn’t actually happen.
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...
Division was the only order.
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.
[I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
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...
Subtlety, which was heading back for the
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
Oh no, Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.
I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle
How about, Yay said, magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetati...
An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took h...
After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.