The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent —power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.

It’s insurance. You heard of that? No? Never mind. It’s like gambling in reverse.”

Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.

“Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job;

what they called “human nature”—the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural—