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

by Terry Pratchett

According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Mandelbrot

This presumably began as a survival trait, since even an extremely hungry bird would find itself inconvenienced by a nasty localized tornado.

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

selachian

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

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.

“They say it’s very boring there. Their biggest curse is ‘May you live in interesting times,’ apparently.”

Most people develop their social conscience when young, during that brief period between leaving school and deciding that injustice isn’t necessarily all bad, and it was something of a shock to suddenly find one at the age of sixty.

Because Rincewind knew very well that when the Four rather small and nasty Horsemen of Panic ride out there is a good job done by Misinformation, Rumor, and Gossip, but they are as nothing compared to the fourth horseman, whose name is Denial.

“Some want to see you enslaved and some want you to run the country, or at least to let them run the country while telling you it’s you doing it really,”