Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry’s line lands like a dry verdict from a witness who’s seen the whole case file. The opening move - “If we know anything about man” - borrows the voice of folksy certainty, the kind people use to justify everything from war to barbecue recipes. Then he snaps the trap shut: what we “know” isn’t noble progress but a baseline volatility. “Not pacific” is an almost prim euphemism, a polite suit buttoned over a brutal body; it’s precisely that restraint in diction that makes the punch harder when he follows with “butcher.”

The phrase “anyone considered undesirable” is doing historical heavy lifting. It’s not just personal vendetta; it’s the bureaucratic, ideological category that lets violence feel clean. “Considered” matters: undesirability isn’t discovered, it’s assigned. McMurtry is pointing at the social mechanism that turns prejudice into policy, neighbor into target. Calling it a “temptation” is colder than calling it evil. Temptation implies pleasure, convenience, a moral shortcut people reach for when fear, scarcity, or power is in the room.

Contextually, McMurtry wrote across American mythologies - the West, masculinity, conquest - and he understood how quickly romance curdles into coercion. His frontier worlds are littered with the consequences of men mistaking dominance for order. The final clause, “not always resisted,” refuses the comfort of inevitability while still indicting our record: the capacity for restraint exists, but history shows how often societies choose the easier story, the easier violence, and call it necessity.