"Your doctrines are remarkable! As if I existed only to fulfill your cravings! Then, since I do not care to do so, the cosmos must be considered insane."

Jack Vance Literature See all quotes by Jack Vance →

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“Evidently you do not trust me. This does not predispose me to trust you.”

“My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.”

“My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.”

““Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?” asked Shimrod. “Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.”

“I suspect that the word was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.”

“Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.”

Resonant Thoughts

"On the approach of spring I withdraw without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure."

— Edward Gibbon

Literature1737–1794

#happiness

"A World to Make treats a subject that is both complex and controversial. Since the end of the Second World War, and with increasing rapidity in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe's former colonial possession…"

— Francis X. Sutton

Economics1917

#freedom

"With a soldier the flag is paramount. I know the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subj…"

— Ulysses S. Grant

Politics1822–1885

#time

"It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man."

— William Faulkner

Literature1923–1962

#knowledge