Jack Vance on Knowledge

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

"“Anacho, my friend,” said Reith, “you have a great deal to learn. The process will come as an appalling shock to you."

"The central problem, so it seemed, was to learn from whose eye he looked forth. Much, after all, would depend upon his viewpoint."

"Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it."

"Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity."

"Who are our basic enemies? This is a secret, unknown even to those basic enemies."

"An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought."

"Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know."

"His brain ached with the want of knowing."

"Motto of the Institute: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; a great deal of knowledge is disaster, which detractors of the Institute scornfully paraphrase to: Somebody else’s ignorance is bliss."

"My own concepts in this regard are easy and clear, and I am sure that the word “simplistic” will be used by my critics. These folk are callow and turgid of intellect; I am reassured by their howls and yelps."

"There is too much knowledge already in the world; we use facts as crutches, to the impoverishment of our senses. Facts are falsehoods; logic is deceit. I know a single system of communication: the declaiming of poetry."

"How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real..."

"“There is war between us that perhaps you cannot completely understand—a long-range combat of our—” she sought for a word to express a complex Lekthwan idea “— moral vitality. In the end we will win. Meanwhile many people suffer.” She shrugged. “The universe is not a paradise."