Raising Steam Quotes

“In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don't really care.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The commander went, as they say in Ankh-Morpork, totally Librarian on them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“That's the trouble, you see. When you've had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don't know how to spit it out.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“We can't just drop everything, sir!"
"Mister Lipwig. Is there something in the word 'tyrant' you do not understand?”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Moist waited. Lord Vetinari could outstare a statue and make even a statue start to feel nervous and confess. Moist's counter was a fetching grin, which he knew annoyed Vetinari beyond measure, and there was absolute silence in the Oblong Office while blank stare and cheery grin battled it out for supremacy in some other dimension.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“I have to ask, sir...Why does it have to be done like this?"
Vetinari smiled. "Can you keep a secret, Mister Lipwig?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I've kept lots."
"Capital. And the point is, so can I. You do not need to know.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world...”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Moist groaned. It was the crack of seven and he was allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“I see embarrassment among all of you. That's good. The thing about being embarrassed is that sooner or later you aren't, but you remember that you were.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“The grags came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Mister Lipwig, the world lives between those who say it cannot be done and those who say that it can. And in my experience, those who say that it can be done are usually telling the truth. It's just a matter of thinking creatively.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Everything is magic when you don’t know what it is. Your sliding rule is a magic wand to most people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Everybody present laughed nervously, except Lord Vetinari, who just laughed.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“people went looking to find themselves and what they found was somebody else.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“the queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“...the world kept turning and the Turtle moved.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Vetinari gave him a look that did not actually employ a raised eyebrow but which implied that one might be forthcoming if the recipient of the look pushed his luck.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“There was always something that you had to do before you could do the thing you wanted to do and even then you might get it wrong.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Don’t force me to draw my own conclusions. I do have a very big pencil.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“It is impossible to accommodate everyone and twice as impossible to please all the dwarfs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“It was like ... like wizardry, but without the wizards and the mess.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“... once you have a dream you've got somewhere closer to a reality.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“All it takes is for people to believe and I am no longer just an artefact put together by clever engineers. I am an idea, a something made of nothing, whose time has come to be. Some may even call me "Goddess”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“This was, after all, Ankh-Morpork, where a man walked free even if he was not, strictly speaking, a man.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam