Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4)

by Terry Pratchett

“Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.”

Waah

It demonstrates the friendly alliance between the University and the civil government which, I may say, seems to consist of their promising to do anything we ask provided we promise not to ask them to do anything.

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

“I heard this wizard down the University say that the Klatchians invented nothing. That was their great contribution to maffs, he said. I said ‘What?’ an’ he said, they come up with zero.”

“Dun’t sound that clever to me,” said Nobby. “Anyone could invent nothing. I ain’t invented anything.”

Vimes’s approach to paperwork was not to touch it until someone was shouting, and then at least there would be someone to help him sort through the stacks.

It wasn’t the clap used by middlings to encourage underlings to applaud overlings.

“There was trouble all over the place

After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.

The dots hung in the air, the ghosts of words unsaid.

Beautiful

In the imaginations of the less civically minded the majesty of the rule of law didn’t carry anything like as much weight as the dread of Detritus.

It was in a ghetto of what Lord Rust would probably call “skilled artisans,” the people too low down the social scale to be movers and shakers but slightly too high to be easily moved or shook.

He assumed bits of his brain came out at night and worked on the problems of the previous

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

To history, choices are merely directions. The Trousers of Time opened up and Vimes began to hurtle down one leg of them.

Odd thing, ain’t it . . . you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.”

Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

“The trick of getting donkeys down from minarets,” said the Patrician, as the desert unwound below them, “is always to find that part of the donkey which seriously wishes to get down.”

“Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being reexamined and reevaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already. No. I was thinking of the first Vimes who tried to make a future and merely made history.

because . . . that’s what was Done. Besides, the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

Ha