Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5)

by Terry Pratchett

Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilized world, i.e. a world that can support historians:

Do you know how hard that is?” “I cherish my ignorance on the subject,” said Lord Vetinari.

It turned gracefully, and the first thing it saw was hundreds of legs and thousands of toes, a whole pork pie factory of piggy-wiggies.

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.§

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like “What is my purpose in life?” very quickly lacked both.

Freedom did, of course, include man’s age-old right to starve to death.

He suddenly felt immensely proud of his countrymen. They might be venal and greedy, but by heaven they were good at it and they never assumed that there wasn’t any more to learn.

When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.