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‘Look, I don’t want to have to come in there and get you!’ said Scattering with heartfelt accuracy.
Nutt was young and as such did not have that reverence for age that is had by, mostly, the aged.
said Smeems, who believed in truth via repetition.
‘I could toy fitfully with a little fruit,’ said the Professor of Recondite Phenomena.
It is a well-known fact in any organization that, if you want a job done, you should give it to someone who is already very busy.
Ponder Stibbons stared at the page in front of him. His mind filled up with nasty questions, the biggest and nastiest of which was simply: Is there any way at all in which people can make out that this is my fault? No. Good!
It meant that if you dared to look up you would see, high above you, the dregs of society.
The last thing she wanted was to see her friend getting ideas in her head. There was such a lot of room in there for them to bounce around and do damage.
‘I’m sure the Bursar would not agree with those figures,’ said the Senior Wrangler sourly. ‘That is so,’ said Ponder, ‘but I’m afraid that is because he regards the decimal point as a nuisance.’
‘People do not understand the limits of tyranny,’ said Vetinari, as if talking to himself. ‘They think that because I can do what I like I can do what I like. A moment’s thought reveals, of course, that this cannot be so.’
Cometh the hour, cometh the…whatever. General comethness, perhaps.
a goddess she would have lots of shoes, and thus many choices: comfy shoes for home truths, hobnail boots for unpleasant truths, simple clogs for universal truths and possibly some kind of slipper for self-evident truth.
More important right now was what kind of truth he was going to have to impart to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty.
Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, ‘The mountain is, and is not.’ They would think, ‘The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana.’
and the sugared arrogance that is the mark of every true gentleman,
Trev could do no right, which he couldn’t contest, but rather felt should be amended to ‘never did any serious wrong’.
Confusion always helped, when it wasn’t yours;
whereas Andy was a stone-cold psychopath who had a following only because it was safer than being in front of him. He could be quite charming when the frantically oscillating mood swing took him; that was the best time to run.
The Watch was not inclined to get involved in alley scuffles, but out in the open they had to do something in case the taxpayers complained, and since tired coppers didn’t like having to do something, they did it good and hard, so with any luck they wouldn’t have to do it again any time soon.
How smart does someone have to be to be as stupid as you?’
Der Selbst uberschritten durch das Ganze.’
If he was a fool, then any man who has ever climbed a mountain or swum a torrent is a fool. If he was a fool then so was the man who first tried to tame fire. If he was a fool then so was the man who tried the first oyster, he was a fool, too–although I’m bound to remark that, given the division of labour in early hunter-gatherer cultures, he was probably a woman as well. Perhaps only a fool gets out of bed. But, after death, some fools shine like stars, and your father is such a one. After death, people forget the foolishness, but they do remember the shine.
Don’t be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.’
‘It’s a kind of medicine with words,’ said Nutt, carefully. ‘Sometimes people fool themselves into believing things that aren’t true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won’t let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out.’
She didn’t have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs.
‘It quite put me off my breakfast. Metaphorically speaking, of course.’
‘In any case the rules don’t concern us at this point. We have to play this game in any eventuality and so we will abide by them in the best traditions of sportsmanship until we have worked out where they may be most usefully broken to our advantage.
importance. A tactic, which I admit looked promising, was for the players to cluster thickly around their own goal so there was no possibility of anything getting past them. I regret, however, that if both teams do this you do not have a game so much as a tableau.
This is the year of the Pensive Hare, after all. People get bored so easily. No wonder there are fights. We need, do we not, to make a sport that is more exciting than beating other people over the head with big weapons.’ ‘That one’s always been very popular,’ said Ponder doubtfully.
‘By myself?’ said Ponder, horrified. ‘I’ve got a huge workload!’ ‘Delegate!’ ‘You know I’m hopeless at delegating, sir!’ ‘Then delegate the job of delegating to someone who isn’t! Now, I must be off before he steals the silverware!’
‘Oh, well, you know how it is with boundaries,’ Ridcully mumbled. ‘You look at what’s on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.
‘Ah yes, tradition is the scourge of endeavour.
The leopard may change his shorts, but I think he’d have a job getting into the ones he wore forty years ago.
Well done. When it comes to the pinch, old friends, united by the bonds of mutual disrespect, cannot bring themselves to actually kill one another. We have hope.
Cheer up, gentlemen. Neither of you has got exactly what you want, but both of you have got exactly what you deserve.
Vetinari, ‘but please credit me with not looking surprised unless, of course, there is some advantage in doing so.’
‘Archchancellor, I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.
Why is there a certain cast of the military mind which leads sensible people to do again, with gusto, what didn’t work before?’
but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s
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Glenda smiled to herself and hurried off to dare everything. Or at least everything that she dared.
We play and are played and the best we can hope for is to do it with style.’
Where a battering ram cannot work, really good shortcrust pastry can often break through.
‘The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord.’ Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. ‘Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one. I think—’
People who had no real idea why they were doing so congregated to listen to other people who also did not know anything, on the basis that ignorance shared is ignorance doubled.
Juliet’s version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.
‘I believe that he collects different types of stationery,’ said Vetinari. ‘I have sometimes speculated that he might change his life for the better should he meet a young lady willing to dress up as a manila envelope.’
Vetinari smiled. ‘The word “peace” is generally defined as a period of rest and rearmament before the next war. Were many assassinations necessary?’ ‘Havelock, sometimes you are too direct!’ ‘I do beg your pardon, it’s just that the progress of history requires butchers as well as shepherds.’
‘Oddly enough, Commander Vimes reminds me of that nearly every day. No civil police force could hold out against an irate and resolute population. The trick is not to let them realize that. Yes?’
The troll officers opened a path for them with the forethought and delicacy that has made police crowd control such a byword.
Ankh-Morpork was not particularly keen on cheering the Patrician but it would cheer money any day of the week.
