Yet, enjoyable as this might be, he had to remember that these people were more dangerous than chimpanzees—and it had been thousands of years since any of them had seen an Anthean undisguised.

Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

Hermetic quote Tevis Fell dangerous

Consider also:

  1. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”
  2. “But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical.”
  3. “As for the rest we wait till the world changes and its reflection changes in our mirror and an hieratical society returns, power descending from the few to the many, from the subtle to the gross, not because some man’s policy has decreed it but because what is so overwhelming cannot be restrained. A new beginning, a new turn of the wheel.”
  4. “He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species.”
  5. “there are no eternal truths, no divine virtues, no heavenly ethics decreed by any God upon mankind. Morals are not carved into stones as commandments by a God; they are a product of societal agreements among people. Mankind makes its own rules, laws, and morals.”