Quotes from Jack London

Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.

They alone moved through the vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to live.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand as well.

Bitter rage was his, but never blind rage. In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot that his enemy was in like passion to rend and destroy.

John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak. If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you, he at last managed to say in a choking voice.

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden.

Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped.

This man did not know cold. Possibly, all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold 107 degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge.

Man always gets less than he demands from life.

And so it came that White Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.

Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being.

This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang's nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.

Wakens the ferine strain.

There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.

Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a plant in good soil.

The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living., though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made.... He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

When he was made, the mould was broke, said Pete.

woe of unnumbered generations

We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.

It was a placing of his destiny in another's hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of existence.  This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.

White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength...There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Gray Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words. It was not his way.