Christopher Jones

“Zakalwe, in all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been 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 this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“He would give up then and console himself with something she'd said. That you could not love what you fully understood. "Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered".”
― Iain M. Banks

“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”
― Iain M. Banks

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion