From the Books

Quotes from Interesting Times

“Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, ‘What happens if I do this?’”

“When you want to incarcerate such an ingenious creature as the common human being, you tend to rely on the good old-fashioned iron bar and large amounts of stone.”

“When you hear a man shouting ‘Forward, brave comrades!’ you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!” - Rincewind

“Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.’”

“You pay a minstrel enough, he’ll sing whatever you want.” - Cohen the Barbarian

“What’s the magic word? Gimme!” - Silver Horder member

“They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.”

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

“[A]n ass may do the work of an ox in a time of no horses.” - Pretty Butterfly

“Bits of paper ruled the world now[.]”

“[S]ometimes people need something to believe in.” - Pretty Butterfly

“When many expect a mighty stallion they will find hooves on an ant.” - Ly Tin Wheedle

‚ÄúHit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.‚Äù - Thieves’ Guild saying

“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.”

“Of the three things that most people know about the horse, the third is that, over a short distance, it can’t run as fast as a man … it has more legs to sort out.”

“Luck is my middle name … Mind you, my first name is Bad.” - Rincewind

“A foot on the neck is nine points of the law.”

“[Y]ou couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid.”

“May you live in interesting times.”

“Inexperienced travelers might think that ‘Aargh!’ is universal, but in Betrobi it means “highly enjoyable” and in Howondaland it means, variously, ‘I would like to eat your foot,’ ‘Your wife is a big hippo,’ and ‘Hello, Thinks Mr. Purple Cat.’ One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting ‘Quick! Extra boiling oil!’”

“[A]nything people had time to write down couldn’t be important.”

“[H]e suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. It was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything.”

“Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep, and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.”

“He hadn’t been frightened, because he didn’t have the imagination.”

“Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer, too.”

“[T]here were no more funny questions. No one wanted to risk getting answers.”

“[Y]es, I am but a small, green, simple object–but I dream about forests.” - the tiny soundless voice in acorns

“[The Archchancellor’s] policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened theway he wanted it to.*

*A policy adopted by almost all managers and several notable gods.”

“[E]ducation 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.”

“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.”

“The shark didn’t think much. Sharks don’t. Their thought processes can largely be represented by ‘=.’ You see it = you eat it.”

“Around [the Circle Sea] are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilized world, i.e. a world that can support historians[.]”

“[C]haos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”

“Fate always wins …

At least, when people stick to the rules.”

“When someone is saved from a certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events–the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there–that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.”

“Fate wins. At least, so it is claimed. Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate.”

“Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out until too late that he’s been using two queens all along.”

Quotes from Going Postal

“Peel away the lies, and the truth would emerge, naked and ashamed and with nowhere else to hide.”

“Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.”

“The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.” - Lord Vetinari

‚ÄúUltimately, there is the freedom to take the consequences.”

“Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn’t care.”

“That was the thing about artificers, they loved explaining. You just had to wait until they reached your level of understanding, even if it meant that they had to lie down.”

“[A]ll property is theft, except mine.”

“There was a pregnant pause. It gave birth to a lot of little pauses, each one more deeply embarrassing than its parent.”

“[A]lthough an elderly man probably has a lot less future than a man of twenty, he’s far more careful about it[.]”

“[I]t’s best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted.” - Dr. Lawn

“[Dr. Lawn] had his name on a plate on his desk, because doctors are so busy they can’t remember everything[.]”

“[D]octors kept skeletons around to cow patients. Nyer, nyer, we know what you look like underneath … ”

“There were, in the main hallway, people who looked like the kind of people whose job it is to say ‘Oi, you!’ when other people just wander in, but [he] generated his personal ‘I’m too important to be stopped’ field, and they never quite managed to frame the words.

And, of course, once you got past the doorway demons of any organization, people just assumed you had a right to be there, and gave you directions.”

“There’s no stink more sorrowful than the stink of wet, burned paper … It means: The end.”

“People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as ‘Is this the laundry?’ ‘How do you spell surreptitious?’ and, on a regular basis, ‘Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.”

“Now he could see the mysterious order clearly. They were robed, of course, because you could’t have a secret order without robes.”

“[Y]ou can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say, ‘Yes please, I’ll some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind.’ It’s a table d’hote or nothing, otherwise … well, it could get silly.” - Mois von Lipqig

“There’s not a city in the world without its Loyal and Ancient and Justified and Hermetic Order of little men who think they can reap the secrets of the ancients for a couple of hours every Thursday night and don’t realize what prats they look in a robe.”

“People looking at you as though you were less than the dust beneath their feet wasone thing, but it was strangely unpleasant when even the dust did that, too.”

“When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve.” - Mr. Pump

“Governments took money off people. That’s what they were for.”

“Freedom may be mankind’s natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling.”

“[T]he man climbing out of your window in a stripy jumper, a mask, and a great hurry might merely be lost on the way to a fancy-dress party, and the man in the wig and robes at the focus of the courtroom might only be a transvestite who wandered in out of the rain. Snap judgments can be so unfair.”

“[T]he mysterious world of finance is a closed, aha, ledger to me[.]” - Lord Vetinari

“A thinking tyrant … had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the peope he was their fault.”

“Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow.”

“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”

“Sometimes things smash so bad it’s better to leave it alone than try to pick up the pieces.” - Tolliver Groat

“Various rhyming slangs are known, and have given the universe such terms as “apples and pears” (stairs), “rubbity-dub” (pub), and “busy bee” (General Theory of Relativity). The Dimwell Street rhyming slang is pretty unique in that it does not, in fact, rhyme. No one knows why, but theories so far advanced are 1) that it is quite complex and in fact follows hidden rules, or 2) Dimwell is well named, or 3) it’s made up to annoy strangers, which is the case with most slangs.”

“There may actually be a man somewhere on whom a toupee works[.]”

“It was a building designed for a purpose. It was, therefore, more or less, a big box to employ people in, with two wings at the rear, which enclosed the big stable yard. Some cheap pillars had been sliced in half and stuck on the outside, some niches had been carved for some miscellaneous stone nymphs, some stone urns had been ranged along the parapet, and thus Architecture had been created.”

“[W]eapons made him nervous, which was why he’d never, ever carried one. Weapons raised the ante far too high. It was much better to rely on a gift for talking his way out of things, confusing the issue, and, if that failed, some well-soled shoes and a cry of ‘Look, what’s that over there?’”

“He knew how to ride without a saddle. Hell, he’d ridden once without pants, too, but luckily all the tar and feathers helped him stick to the horse.”

“Anyone who couldn’t simply remember where he stashed a great big fortune deserved to lose it[.]”

“There is a saying, ‘You can’t fool an honest man,’ which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men.”

“Always move fast. You never know what’s catching you up.”

“[N]o practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences.” - Lord Vetinari

“I commend my soul to any god that can find it.” - Moist von Lipwig

“Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.”

“They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”

“People who step onto the air one hundred and fifty feet above the ground seldom have much to discuss afterwards.”