Pride

I put quotes here often from things I have read.  Sometimes from surprising sources.  This comes from "Raiders of Gor", the sixth book in the Chronicles of Counter-Earth.  It was a very long sci-fi series and some of the books, especially the later ones, were seriously awful.  But there was the occasional gem.




"There was only one last obstacle," said Samos, "and neither of you, even now, fully understand it."

"What is that?" I asked.

"Your pride," he said. "that of both of you." 

He smiled. "When you lost your images of yourselves, and learned your humanity, in your diverse ways, and shame, you abandoned your myths, your songs, and would accept only the meat of animals, as though one so lofty as yourself must be either Priest-King or beast. Your pride demanded either the perfection of the myth or the perfection of its most villainous renunciation. If you were not the highest, you would be nothing less than the worse; if there was not the myth there was to be nothing." 

Samos now spoke softly. "there is something," he said, "between the fancies of poets and the biting, and the rooting and sniffing of beasts."

"What?" I asked.

"Man," he said.

John Norman - Raiders of Gor