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Few problems have ever been solved by ignoring them.

— Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Page 13)

And only recently have circumstances forced us, in this current era of human rupture, to search for the unseen stirrings of the human heart, to discover the origins of our discontents.

— Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Page 11)

He said, then, that one day he ran into Socrates, who had just bathed and put on his fancy sandles—both very unusual events.

— Symposium by Πλάτων (Page 3)

Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. Who do you think has the real martial provenance here? In a fight, you’d have no choice but to try to destroy me immediately. You’d fail. I’d have a choice of just how humiliatingly to cripple you. This is the truth; depend.

— The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (97%)

~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

— The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (97%)

The first problem was getting all the bits and pieces out of the way, so there would be room for itself.

Actually, who was it kidding? The first problem was all about not blowing up the world, or at the very least not annihilating both itself, fifty horizontal kilometres of Girdlecity, who-knew-how-many lives locally and immediately, and then an additional who-knew-how-sizable number over a significant proportion of the rest of the planet with the resulting fireball, blast front, secondary debris impact events and all the resulting ancillary fire, tertiary impact and ground-shock effects.

Another fucking day at the office, the ship thought

— The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (94%)

“I’m a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I’m not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite.

— The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (83%)