Excession (Culture, #5)

by Iain M. Banks

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

probably they thought hangovers were just annoying, rather than character-forming and so had, shortsightedly, dispensed with them.

there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.