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Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

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
Sense
Extinction
Place
Avoiding
Wells
Accomplish
Firsts
Method
Well
Oneself
Self
Common
Equip
First
Means
Indicated
Mean
Experience
Reliable

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Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
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After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.
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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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The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
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Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
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I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
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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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I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.
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He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
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...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
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Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
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What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
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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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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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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.
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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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I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
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I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
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