Quote

Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.

Jack Vance

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Jack Vance
Age: 96 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 2013
Died: May 26
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
San Francisco County
California
John Holbrook Vance
Jack Vance
John H. Vance
Never
Party
Favorable
Whether
Realizes
Human
Transactions
Humans
Interaction
Come
Worse
Disequilibrium
Must
Balance
Transaction
Even
Achieve
Stimulated
Always
Realizing
Interactions

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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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.
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Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.
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I never worked in an office in my life.
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
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A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope it's lessening the tension.
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I'd never been published when I was young.
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Truth is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
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In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
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Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.
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There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
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