Raising Steam (Discworld, #40; Industrial Revolution, #6; Moist von Lipwig, #3)

by Terry Pratchett

from a distance, the world might conceivably look to be at peace, a state of affairs that always ends in war, eventually.

peace is what you have while incubating the next war.

It is said that a soft answer turneth away wrath, but this assertion has a lot to do with hope and was now turning out to be patently inaccurate,

Crisp was happy being a handyman whilst Moist was happy not picking up anything that was heavier than a glass. After all, his work was unseen and depended on words, which were fortunately not very heavy and didn’t need grease.

There was a difference between a banker and a crook, there really was, and although it was very, very teeny Moist felt that he should point out that it did exist

It was an inspiring dream, if you didn’t look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong.*20

“Any three dwarfs having a sensible conversation will always end up having four points of view.”

All the time the fanglers and artificers were coming up with even more useful things that hadn’t been foreseen and suddenly became essential. And the pillars of the world remained unshaken.

It was the crack of seven and he was allergic to the concept of two seven o’clocks in one day.

He’s the kind of man who’d follow you into a revolving door and still come out in front.

Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.

Technically speaking, Quirm and Ankh-Morpork were bosom friends, after centuries of conflict mostly about things that turned out to be inessential, inconsequential, untrue, or downright lies.

he believed that the more people knew about one another, the better they got along.

Let me tell you, the world changes with every generation and if we don’t learn to surf on the tide then we will be smashed on the rocks.”

here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.

When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.”

Of the trading routes in Zemphis, the Aglet Road stood out, as caravans of camels arrived on their way to bring the people of the Plains the tiny little things on the ends of their shoelaces without which civilized life would be unbearable and quite dangerous.

“It’s probably true that I taught you all you know, young dwarf, but I did not teach you all I know. I have some skills that I didn’t impart.”

In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don’t really care. Do you understand this? Dwarfs now have seen liberty. And that’s heady stuff.”

“Well … magic,” said Moist. “Everything is magic when you don’t know what it is. Your sliding rule is a magic wand to most people.

it is the truth! You know … that thing which remains when all the lies have been burned away.