The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

It isn’t the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.”

The conclusion thus being that the most effective defence against intellectual domination is roundly to affront the domineering intellectual.

it is better to go forward without an aim than loiter without an aim, and with surety much better than to retreat without an aim.

Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice.

At any cost, and using any methods, per fas et nefas. For the law is not jurisprudence, not a weighty tome full of articles, not philosophical treatises, not peevish nonsense about justice, not hackneyed platitudes about morality and ethics. The law means safe paths and highways. It means backstreets one can walk along even after sundown. It means inns and taverns one can leave to visit the privy, leaving one’s purse on the table and one’s wife beside it. The law is the sleep of people certain they’ll be woken by the crowing of the rooster and not the crashing of burning roof timbers! And for those who break the law: the noose, the axe, the stake and the red-hot iron! Punishments which deter others. Those that break the law should be caught and punished. Using all available means and methods…

For, after all, the result of all great crackdowns on miscreants is always that the miscreants enter the ranks of the guardians of public order en masse. Your vision is a world of bribery, blackmail and entrapment, a world of turning imperial evidence and false witnesses. A world of snoopers and coerced confessions. Informing and the fear of being informed upon. And inevitably the day will come in your world when the flesh of the wrong person will be torn with pincers, when an innocent person is hanged or impaled. And then it will be a world of crime.

“Heeey!” yelled somebody from among the buildings. “Heeeelp! Heeeelp! Murder, vicious killers!” “Troops! Call out the troops!” shouted another miner, shooing away children who—as is the immemorial custom of all the world’s children—had appeared from nowhere to watch and get in the way.

“Anyone,” Avallac’h wiped his hands on a rag, “can foretell the future. And everyone does it, for it is simple. It is no great art to foretell it. The art is in foretelling it accurately.”

Sex. After almost a hundred years it becomes boring. There’s nothing in it to fascinate or excite any longer, nothing that has the exciting appeal of novelty. It has all been done already… In this or that way, but it has happened. And then suddenly comes the Conjunction of the Spheres and you, people, appear here. Human survivors, come from another world, from your former world, which you managed utterly to destroy with your still-hirsute hands, barely five million years after evolving as a species. There’s only a handful of you, your life expectancy is ridiculously low, so your survival depends on the pace of reproduction. Thus unbridled lust never leaves you, sex totally governs you; it’s a drive more powerful even than the survival instinct. To die? Why not, if one can fuck around beforehand. That is your entire philosophy.”