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Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.
there was a place for everything, and everything ought to be in its place.
Idirans relied on themselves, not on their machines, and so they were still part of life. To him, that made all the difference.
In the end, they were rational. They listened to common sense before their own emotions. The only thing they believed without proof was that there was a purpose to life, that there was something which was translated in most languages as “God,” and that that God wanted a better existence for His creations.
Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all….
“You have to be positive. Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.”
I’m going to take the son of a bitch back to the fleet so they can court-martial him. Dirtying his name is a punishment; killing him would be doing him a favor;
“No aces up your sleeve?” “No sleeves, Perosteck.”
“That is the way with all of your kind,” Xoxarle said to the old man, who wasn’t looking. “It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strains survive and the weakest die.
“I don’t think you really belong here,
“The brave belong where they decide.”
the Culture was threatened… not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or territory, but with something more important: the loss of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.
