Jack Vance - Man Quotes

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It is simple dog-eat-dog, said Waylock. It's basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession—not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded.

Jack Vance
"A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asserevate the structure and history of the entire universe!" : Bah!" muttered Hurtiancz. "By the same token, a sensible man need lisen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense."

Jack Vance
Speaking our language, you will understand us—and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.

Jack Vance
I learned a great deal, said Beran. And then I lost all heart for further learning.
Palafox's eyes glinted. Education is not achieved through the heart—it is a systematization of the mental processes.
But I am something other than a mental process, said Beran. I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.

Jack Vance
Are you yourself a Christian?
The young man made a negative sign. The concepts of religion baffle me.
This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional, said the ex-priest. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

Jack Vance
I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.

Jack Vance
Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.
He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.

Jack Vance
The history of man is a compendium of such evil. We are an evolutionary product, descendants of predators. A few synthetic foods aside, every morsel eaten by man is taken from another living thing. We are intended for murder; we kill to exist!

Jack Vance
There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

Jack Vance
A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain.... The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

Jack Vance
'Humanity is old, civilization is new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort. We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolutes is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men.'

Jack Vance
"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."

Jack Vance
What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.

Jack Vance