Jack Vance Quotes

I think Christine and Chad are on the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Christine is a model victim, and Chad is a model perpetrator, and Howard is closer to the middle.

When one side benefits more than the other, that's a win-lose situation. To the winner it might look like success for a while, but in the long run, it breeds resentment and distrust.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

Prison makes an interesting context for so many different characters to come together. You get to see what lines get drawn between people.

Publishing companies are like schoolyard bullies that can't even fight well.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose; while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.

The weak are always at war with the stronger; that is the source of eternal hatreds.

We cannot negotiate with those who say, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable.

The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.

Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted.

If too much harmony dominates, then aggression can get lost.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

I am part of the load not rightly balanced . . .

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.

Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.

The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.

As soon as there was two there was pride.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.