Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3)

by Terry Pratchett

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.

It was easy enough to imagine an ennobled Nobbs. Because where Nobby went wrong was in thinking small. He sidled into places and pinched things that weren’t worth much. If only he’d sidled into continents and stolen entire cities, slaughtering many of the inhabitants in the process, he’d have been a pillar of the community.

“In the Fyres of Struggle let us bake New Men, who Will Notte heed the Old Lies.”

He said to people: you’re free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he’d been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who’ve seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door—

But the man stayed alive by always arranging matters so that a future without him represented a riskier business than a future with him still upright.

A group of figures lurched, staggered, or in one case rolled through the fog like the Four Horsemen of a small Apocalypse.

The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.

I’m worried and confused, he thought. So the first rule in the book is to spread it around.

If you started wondering whether a man could be poisoned by words, you might as well accuse the wallpaper of driving him mad. Mind you, that horrible green color would drive anyone insane . . .

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.

Not Thou Shalt Not. Say I Will Not.

“That’s blasphemy,” said the vampire. He gasped as Vimes shot him a glance like sunlight. “That’s what people say when the voiceless speak. Take him away, Dorfl. Put him in the palace dungeons.”

“Did you really punch the president of the Assassins’ Guild?” “Yes, sir.” “Why?” “Didn’t have a dagger, sir.”

“Funny thing, that,” said Nobby. “You never get bad fortunes in cookies, ever noticed that? They never say stuff like: ‘Oh dear, things are going to be really bad.’ I mean, they’re never misfortune cookies.”