Jack Vance

Which is better: cheap submission or expensive independence?

“I perceive your ideological bias.”

“It is not bias to favor the tried and true ways of the past; it is ordinary common sense.”

There’s ample human achievement in the universe, but not nearly enough beauty.

I know now what I should have known every moment of my life; that unless you help yourself, you die a slave. The fact is basic.

Perhaps you mistake assurance for insolence…Agreed, the qualities sometimes converge.

The cantons of Shant were alike only in their mutual distrust. Each regarded as Universal Principles its own customs, costumes, jargon, and mannerisms and considered all else eccentricity.

“The burglar suffered a harsh fate,” Frolitz told Etzwane.” The lesson to be learned is this: Never commit an unlawful act. Especially, never steal; when you take a man’s property, your life becomes forfeit, as has just been demonstrated.”

Loy rubbed his chin with uneasy fingers. “In a sense, the penalty seems extreme. The burglar took goods but lost his life. These are the laws of Elphine which the Faceless Man correctly enforced—but should a bagful of goods and a man’s life weigh so evenly on the balance?”

The white-haired stranger offered his opinion. “Why should it be otherwise? You ignore a crucial factor in the situation. Property and life are not incommensurable, when property is measured in terms of human toil. Essentially property is life; it is that proportion of life which an individual has expended to gain the property. When a thief steals property, he steals life. Each act of pillage therefore becomes a small murder.”

Justice, a human invention, is as protean as the race itself, and varies from canton to canton. The traveler must be wary lest he contravene some unfamiliar local ordinance.

Finnerack warmed to his subject. “Further, why should some toil for a mouthful of bread while long-fingered sybarites partake of Forty-Five Dishes? The good things should be divided; we should start the new system on a basis of equality.”

Mialambre responded: “Your sentiments or generous and do you credit. All I can say is that such drastic redistributions have previously been attempted, always to result in chaos and cruel tyranny of one sort or another. This is the lesson of history, which we must now heed.”

Finnerack offered no further opinions.

If the study of human interactions could become a science, I suspect that an inviolate axiom might be discovered to this effect: Every social disposition creates a disparity of advantages. Further: Every innovation designed to correct the disparities, no matter how altruistic in concept, works only to create a new and different set of disparities.

Events rush together. History occurs.

“I have not been tamed,” said Finnerack. “I have only been enslaved.”