24 quotes
What the common man calls Evil, he once told me, is nothing more than the fear of one’s own potential.
Jack Faust (1997)
This is the price you must pay for knowledge: You must understand and acknowledge its consequences.
Jack Faust (1997)
“Out of doors on a moonless night?” Mette sneered. “Only fools, footpads, and astrologers stray where there is no light.”
Jack Faust (1997)
The hearsay of hearsay is not admissible as scholarship.
Jack Faust (1997)
That is the true measure of love, you see, the evil one will stoop to for its sake...
Jack Faust (1997)
Our records must be scrupulous, whether they show what we want them to show or not.
Jack Faust (1997)
It pained him to think how naive he had once been.
Jack Faust (1997)
Still, it was no easy thing to flirt in German.
Jack Faust (1997)
They were not aware of the madness that lurked within their own minds.
Jack Faust (1997)
There was so much going on, and so little he cared to know about!
Jack Faust (1997)
Urban life was thus founded upon the principle of deliberately confounding those who were not a part of it. Civilization was a strategy of exclusion.
Jack Faust (1997)
This was human glory—a sad and exhaust-darkened memorial for good citizens to ignore and drunks to piss upon on their way home from the brothels. Here was the omega-point of all ambition.
Jack Faust (1997)
(Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.)
Jack Faust (1997)
He was not actually drunk, but emotion made him feel as if he were. Sorrow, loss, anger—these were as good as a bottle of the very worst gin.
Jack Faust (1997)
(All human beings have their price, and quite often it is surprisingly small. The trick consists of knowing exactly what that price is, when they themselves do not.)
Jack Faust (1997)
(There are three stages to a battle: First you’re bored. Then you’re terrified. Then you’re dead. Each is necessary, and they must all come in the proper order.)
Jack Faust (1997)
It was not possible for her to rejoin the unthinking world, becoming as she had been before, sleepily and smugly ignorant of consequences. There were thoughts that once thought, could not be unthought.
Jack Faust (1997)
Faust had no delusions of Heavenly aid. An involved and benevolent deity would have helped him long years ago when, young, he had yearned for knowledge as achingly as now and with far fewer stains on his soul.
Jack Faust (1997)
“Paid off? Do you mean bribery?”
“That is, umm, not an entirely pleasant word for it.” Dreschler’s doughy face took on a pained expression. “It is more in the nature of an advance payment to ensure the labor force will be satisfied with the negotiated wage schedules.”
Jack Faust (1997)
He had for many years thought of Christ as a rival in greatness. Now he realized they were both brothers in misery. Their enemies were identical: the howling mob, the fearful, the inferior, the baying hounds of conventional morality.
Jack Faust (1997)