Adventure is just another name for having the daylights scared out of you and living to tell about it. - Jack Vance

The big man’s scowl deepened. “You’re not what I expected.”
“Intelligence, facility, resourcefulness are not like neckties, to be displayed as ornaments,” Magnus Ridolph pointed out.

Sacerdotal, religious or priest-dominated societies are like organisms with a cancer.

His decision was preordained, and derived from a perverse quirk in his mentality. At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction. This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true.