Smoke Bellew - Jack London

Men are the products of their environment.

What other men can do, we can do.

A system is statistical. When you get the right system you can't lose, and that's the difference between it and a hunch. You never know when the right hunch is going wrong.

What's the good of turning back after getting this far?

A man was not beaten until he was beaten.

It is in moments of exhaustion that men lose all their reserves of civilization.

Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.

Through his brain was running a phrase of the mad philosopher "the transvaluation of values". In truth, he was less interested in staking a fortune than in beating Shorty. After all, he concluded, it wasn't the reward of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain.

Systems is sure losers. They ain't no hunches in systems.

I've got my taste of meat, and I like it. I'm going on.

It strikes me that stampeding is at best a sporting proposition.