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But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn’t a time. It’s a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
You can’t shoot servants for putting your shoes the wrong way round, you know. It’s too messy. He’ll have to learn right from left like the rest of us. And right from wrong, too.’
Walking was important, Vimes had always said, and because Vimes had said it Carrot believed it. Walking and talking. Walk far enough and talk to enough people and sooner or later you had an answer.
Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate
One of the advantages of a life much longer than average was that you saw how fragile the future was. Men said things like ‘peace in our time’ or ‘an empire that will last a thousand years’, and less than half a lifetime later no one even remembered who they were, let alone what they had said or where the mob had buried their ashes. What changed history were smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would do the trick.
Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows – sometimes it doesn’t even need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.
When a human doctor, after much bleeding and cupping, finds that a patient has died out of sheer desperation, he can always say, ‘Dear me, will of the gods, that will be thirty dollars please,’ and walk away a free man. This is because human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars.
What set Vimes’s teeth on edge was the idea that kings were a different kind of human being. A higher lifeform. Somehow magical.
You wouldn’t find slum dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords. And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.
‘Who say?’ ‘They, sir. You know, they.’ ‘The same people who’re the “everyone” in “everyone knows”? The people who live in “the community”?’
They thought themselves part of the march of history, the tide of progress and the wave of the future. They were men who felt that The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists and hooded secret societies, but they’re in real trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit around a big table and think thoughts like that.
‘Lot of ordinary men sit around a table and talk and suddenly the world’s a different place? The sheep turn round and charge the shepherd?’
Cheery’s shoulders sagged with released tension. When you’ve made up your mind to shout out who you are to the world, it’s a relief to know that you can do it in a whisper.
‘The big trouble,’ he added, ‘is that everyone wants someone else to read their minds for them and then make the world work properly.
When they were out in the fog Carrot said, ‘Do you think there’s something a bit … odd about Littlebottom?’ ‘Seems like a perfectly ordinary female to me,’ said Angua. ‘Female? He told you he was female?’ ‘She,’ Angua corrected. ‘This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.’
‘It’s astonishing. Frankly astonishing. The man has actually got charisn’tma.’ ‘Your meaning?’ ‘I mean he’s so dreadful he fascinates people.
‘Money is all you can think about when all you have is a price,’ said Carrot calmly,
They’re just machines for doing work!’ ‘That’s how they’re treated, certainly,’ said Carrot.
Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.
Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-minded little jerk, sir?’
You couldn’t say, ‘I had orders.’ You couldn’t say, ‘It’s not fair.’ No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself.
‘Commander Vimes said someone has to speak for the people with no voices!’ He really believes it, Angua thought. Vimes puts words in his head.
WORDS IN THE HEART CAN NOT BE TAKEN.
His notebook was beside it, page after page of laborious scrawl to remind him that he was trying to understand a complex world by means of his simple mind.
‘The common people?’ said Vimes. ‘They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit.
Law Is The Servant of Freedom. Freedom Without Limits Is Just A Word,’ said Dorfl ponderously.
‘Is It Frightening To Be Free?’ ‘You said it.’ ‘You Say To People “Throw Off Your Chains” And They Make New Chains For Themselves?’ ‘Seems to be a major human activity,
‘Either All Days Are Holy Or None Are. I Have Not Decided Yet.’
