It was right and proper to exploit the excellences of the moment, but still, when conditions reached an apex, there was nowhere to go but down. - Jack Vance

“There is war between us that perhaps you cannot completely understand—a long-range combat of our—” she sought for a word to express a complex Lekthwan idea “— moral vitality. In the end we will win. Meanwhile many people suffer.” She shrugged. “The universe is not a paradise.”

“Is this the conduct of a ‘sly and unpredictable villain’?”
“Decidedly so, if the villain, for the purposes of his joke, thinks to simulate the altruist.”
“Then how will you know villain from altruist?”
Cugel shrugged. “It is not an important distinction.”

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.