Quote

The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.

Iain Banks

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Iain Banks
Age: 59 †
Born: 1954
Born: February 16
Died: 2013
Died: June 9
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Iain M. Banks
Iain Menzies Banks
Always
Force
Controlled
Elemental
Like
Away
Useful
Elementals
Truth
Forces
Intelligently
Need
Putting
Sweep
Great
Rain
Drown
Needs
Water
Morally
Much
Faith
Managed
Allocated
Good
Natural
Flood
Channeled

More quotes by Iain Banks

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I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
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Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
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Torture is such a slippery slope as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
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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.
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I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
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The History Of The Universe In Three Words CHAPTER ONE Bang! CHAPTER TWO sssss CHAPTER THREE crunch. THE END
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Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
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Dead Air' is full of rants it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty mea culpa.
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The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
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A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
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One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
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One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
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I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.
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Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories.
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Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.
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Escape is a consumer goods like another
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Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear
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I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
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