Quotes by Jack Vance

“If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the huma...”

“I would offer congratulations were it not for this tentacle gripping my leg.”

“Where was his knife, upon which he relied? He had cut cheese for their noonday meal, and had packed the knife away with the cheese.Aillas said: 'Sir, before we continue with this matter, may I offe...”

“How I hate you," he said softly. "If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”

“There had been an attempt to humiliate him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, has no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent.”

“Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.”

“The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle o...”

“Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox—finally irregulationary.”

“The Vine of Life grows a single melon. The color of the heart is unknown until the rind is split.”

“The less a writer discusses his work—and himself—the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirr...”

“Gambling, in the ultimate study, stems from the passive, the submissive, the irresponsible in human nature; the gambler is one of an inferior lickspittle breed who turns himself belly-upward to the...”

“Legality is the mathematics of social conduct, said Magnus Ridolph. It is equally as cogent as the mathematics of probability.”

“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; ...”

“I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.”

“I can now report that the mathematics of the multiple focus are a most improbable thicket, and the useful service I enforced upon what I must call an absurd set of contradictions is one of my secre...”

“We’ll rack our brains and either solve your problem or come up come up with new and better ones.”

“If one basic axiom controls the cosmos, it must be this: In a situation of infinity every possible condition occurs, not once, but an infinite number of times.”

“Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live...”

“Sorry, I’m not at home. I have gone out to my world Fancy, and I cannot be reached. Call back in a week, unless your business is urgent, in which case call back in a month.”

“You’re sure you want to look into these cognates? You might see things you wouldn’t like.So long as I know the truth, I don’t care whether I like it or not.”