Quotes from book
The Gray Prince

Name: The Gray Prince
Author: Jack Vance

Thirty thousand years in the future, on the once peaceful planet Koryphon, reformist Uldras pursue their legal and extra-legal crusade for reclaiming tribal lands long ruled by Outkers, colonizing human land barons. Reprint.

“Except for a few special cases, title to every parcel of real property derives from an act of violence, more or less remote, and ownership is only as valid as the strength and will required to maintain it. That is the lesson of history, whether you like it or not.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

“The mourning of defeated peoples, while pathetic and tragic, is usually futile,” said Kelse.
Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 16 (p. 159)

“The travesty exists only because reliance upon abstraction has made reality incomprehensible to you.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 16 (p. 159)

“How I hate you. If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 15 (p. 152)

“Urban folk, dealing as they do in ideas and abstractions, become conditioned to unreality. Then, wherever the fabric of civilization breaks, these people are as helpless as fish out of water.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 4 (p. 49)

“You used the word ‘civilization,’ which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 4 (p. 48)