The Truth by Terry Pratchett
... although it was possible to live on figs you soon wished you didn't. (TT)
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise. (TT)
…the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works. (TT)
...Dibbler was an extremely good hot sausage salesman. He had to be, given the nature of his sausages. (TT)
It would seem quite impossible, on such a mucky night, that there could have been anyone to witness this scene.
But there was. The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it cease to exist. (TT)
They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted. (TT)
… he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane. (TT)
“You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office-”
“Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in the cupboards and throw it out the window at night.” (TT)
There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. (TT)
A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare. The staff at Hugglestones believed that in sufficient quantities ‘being keen’ could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight and training. (TT)
Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break. (TT)
He was all in favour of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window. (TT)
The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they had very little up to look down from. (TT)
There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent. (TT)
It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand. (TT)
‘What causes that, do you think?’
‘Science, probably,’ said Hughnon vaguely. Like his wizardly brother, Archchancellor Mustrum, he didn’t like to bother himself with patently silly questions. Both gods and magic required solid, sensible men, and the brothers Ridcully were solid as rocks. And, in some respects, as sensible. (TT)
‘I’m sure no one could call me a despot, your reverence,’ said Lord Vetinari severely.
Hughnon Ridcully made a misjudged attempted to lighten the mood. ‘Not twice at any rate, ahahah.’ (TT)
‘And these are your reasons, my Lord?’
‘Do you think I have others?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.’
Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all. (TT)
'The world turns, your reverence, and we must spin with it.' (TT)
Sometimes the weather has no sense of narrative convenience. (TT)
‘We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.’ (TT)
‘It’ll end in trouble, my lord,’ said Ridcully. He’d found it a good general comment in practically any debate. Besides, it was so often true.
Lord Vetinari sighed. ‘In my experience, practically everything does,’ he said. ‘That is the nature of things. All we can do is sing as we go.’ (TT)
He'd found hard truth less hard than an easy lie. (TT)
There was this to be said about the Smell of Foul Ole Ron, an odour so intense that it took on a personality of its own and fully justified the capital letter: after the initial shock the organs of smell just gave up and shut down, as if no more able to comprehend the thing than an oyster can comprehend the ocean. (TT)
…she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners. (TT)
He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone’. (TT)
Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation. (TT)
‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’ (TT)
Moving his hands carefully, Dibbler opened the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling. (TT)
…William wondered why he always disliked people who said ‘no offence meant’. Maybe it was because they found it easier to say ‘no offence meant’ than actually refrain from giving offence. (TT)
...So now it was dawning on some of the brighter ones that the only way people would accept vampires was if they stopped being vampires. That was a high price to pay for social acceptability, but perhaps not so high as the one that involved having your head cut off and your ashes scattered on the river. A life of steak tartare wasn’t too bad if you compared it with a death of stake au naturel. (TT)
... the only thing more dangerous than a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. (TT)
William's class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it. (TT)
'He's a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don't often hear it.' (TT)
Truth was what he told. Honesty was sometimes not the same thing. (TT)
‘Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘There’re still some around, aren’t there?’ (TT)
When people say clearly something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all. (TT)
The press waited. It looked, now, like a great big beast. Soon he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up. (TT)
‘But I’m not doing anything wrong,’ said William.
‘No, it may just be you’re not doing anything illegal,’ said Vimes. (TT)
‘Keep avay from me! And do not breathe like zat!’ Otto wailed.
‘Like what?’
‘Zer bosoms going in and out and up and down like zat! I am a vampire! A fainting young lady, please understand, zer panting, zer heaving of bosoms ... it calls somezing terrible from within ... ‘(TT)
Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It’s one of those words that describes something that does not make a noise, but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss. (TT)
... Mrs Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts... (TT)
... to the kind of men who seek power, gratitude has very poor keeping qualities. (TT)
Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day. (TT)
...Mrs. Arcanum came downstairs and into the kitchen armed with a lamp, a poker and most importantly with her hair in curlers. The combination would be a winner against all but the most iron-stomached intruder. (TT)
'... I'm useless. I was educated to be useless. What we've always been supposed to do is hang around until there's a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we've mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.' (TT)
Goodmountain grinned. ‘Don’t worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn’t anymore.’
‘What changed his mind?’
‘I reckon it was the dying that did it.’ (TT)
And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term 'in my humble opinion', which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, 'these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed'. (TT)
…everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning – with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic – that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out. (TT)
She’d been a respectable young woman for some time. In certain people, that means there’s a lot of dammed-up disreputability just waiting to burst out. (TT)
Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness, apart from in a very sternly abridged dictionary. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap. (TT)
…sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove. (TT)
‘You don’t think a dress like this would be a bit…forward, do you?’ said Sacharissa, holding the dress against herself.
Rocky looked worried. He hadn’t been hired for his dress sense, and certainly not for his grasp of colloquial Middle Class.
‘You’re quite a lot forward already,’ he opined.
‘I meant make me look like a fast woman!’
‘Ah, right,’ said Rocky, getting there. ‘No. Def’initly not.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. No one could run much in a dress like dat.’ (TT)
Mr. Tulip raised a trembling hand. ‘Is this the bit where my whole life passes in front of my eyes?’ he said.
NO, THAT WAS THE BIT JUST NOW.
‘Which bit?’
THE BIT, said Death, BETWEEN YOU BEING BORN AND YOU DYING. NO, THIS ... MR. TULIP, THIS IS YOUR WHOLE LIFE AS IT PASSED BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE’S EYES... (TT)
‘…a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on…’ (TT)
'... are you sure it's all true?'
'I'm sure it's all journalism', said William.
'And what is that supposed to mean?'
'It means it's true enough for now.' (TT)
'... they know they're on the right side because if they are on it it must be the right side, by definition...' (TT)
The mountains of madness have many little plateaux of sanity. (TT)
DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. (TT)
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN? The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato.
SQUEAK, he said.
Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE. (TT)
What was the worst that could happen?
So many things, he thought as he set out again, that it would be hard to decide which one was the worst. (TT)
'Did I say "thank you?"'
'No, you did not.'
'Oh, dear.'
'No, you noticed that you didn't, so zat is okay,' said Otto. (TT)
'We're on the same side here!'
'No. We're just on two different sides that happen to be side by side.' (TT)
‘The right to free speech is an old Ankh-Morpork tradition.’
‘Good heavens, is it?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘How did that one survive?’ (TT)
‘...Mrs. Tilly, I think you wrote a lovely well-spelled and grammatical letter to us suggesting that everyone under the age of eighteen should be flogged once a week to stop them being so noisy?’
‘Once a day, Mr de Worde,’ said Mrs. Tilly. ‘That’ll teach ‘em to go around being young!’ (TT)
Rocky was supplying some sports news, and while it was unreadable to William he put it in on the basis that anyone keen on sport probably couldn’t read. (TT)
'So ... we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in?'
'Except the public, sir,' said William, trying to keep up.
'Which isn't the same as people and humans.'
'I think it's more complicated than that, sir.' (TT)
‘I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas,’ said Lord Vetinari. (TT)
‘In return, however,’ said the Patrician, ‘I must ask you not to upset Commander Vimes.’ He gave a little cough. ‘More than necessary.’
‘I’m sure we can pull together, sir.’
‘Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress.’ (TT)
'Things that are back to front are often easier to comprehend if they are upside down as well, said Lord Vetinari, tapping his chin with the silver knob of his can in an absent-minded way. 'In life as in politics.' (TT)
…nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth. (TT)
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise. (TT)
…the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works. (TT)
...Dibbler was an extremely good hot sausage salesman. He had to be, given the nature of his sausages. (TT)
It would seem quite impossible, on such a mucky night, that there could have been anyone to witness this scene.
But there was. The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it cease to exist. (TT)
They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted. (TT)
… he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane. (TT)
“You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office-”
“Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in the cupboards and throw it out the window at night.” (TT)
There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. (TT)
A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare. The staff at Hugglestones believed that in sufficient quantities ‘being keen’ could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight and training. (TT)
Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break. (TT)
He was all in favour of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window. (TT)
The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they had very little up to look down from. (TT)
There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent. (TT)
It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand. (TT)
‘What causes that, do you think?’
‘Science, probably,’ said Hughnon vaguely. Like his wizardly brother, Archchancellor Mustrum, he didn’t like to bother himself with patently silly questions. Both gods and magic required solid, sensible men, and the brothers Ridcully were solid as rocks. And, in some respects, as sensible. (TT)
‘I’m sure no one could call me a despot, your reverence,’ said Lord Vetinari severely.
Hughnon Ridcully made a misjudged attempted to lighten the mood. ‘Not twice at any rate, ahahah.’ (TT)
‘And these are your reasons, my Lord?’
‘Do you think I have others?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.’
Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all. (TT)
'The world turns, your reverence, and we must spin with it.' (TT)
Sometimes the weather has no sense of narrative convenience. (TT)
‘We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.’ (TT)
‘It’ll end in trouble, my lord,’ said Ridcully. He’d found it a good general comment in practically any debate. Besides, it was so often true.
Lord Vetinari sighed. ‘In my experience, practically everything does,’ he said. ‘That is the nature of things. All we can do is sing as we go.’ (TT)
He'd found hard truth less hard than an easy lie. (TT)
There was this to be said about the Smell of Foul Ole Ron, an odour so intense that it took on a personality of its own and fully justified the capital letter: after the initial shock the organs of smell just gave up and shut down, as if no more able to comprehend the thing than an oyster can comprehend the ocean. (TT)
…she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners. (TT)
He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone’. (TT)
Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation. (TT)
‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’ (TT)
Moving his hands carefully, Dibbler opened the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling. (TT)
…William wondered why he always disliked people who said ‘no offence meant’. Maybe it was because they found it easier to say ‘no offence meant’ than actually refrain from giving offence. (TT)
...So now it was dawning on some of the brighter ones that the only way people would accept vampires was if they stopped being vampires. That was a high price to pay for social acceptability, but perhaps not so high as the one that involved having your head cut off and your ashes scattered on the river. A life of steak tartare wasn’t too bad if you compared it with a death of stake au naturel. (TT)
... the only thing more dangerous than a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. (TT)
William's class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it. (TT)
'He's a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don't often hear it.' (TT)
Truth was what he told. Honesty was sometimes not the same thing. (TT)
‘Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘There’re still some around, aren’t there?’ (TT)
When people say clearly something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all. (TT)
The press waited. It looked, now, like a great big beast. Soon he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up. (TT)
‘But I’m not doing anything wrong,’ said William.
‘No, it may just be you’re not doing anything illegal,’ said Vimes. (TT)
‘Keep avay from me! And do not breathe like zat!’ Otto wailed.
‘Like what?’
‘Zer bosoms going in and out and up and down like zat! I am a vampire! A fainting young lady, please understand, zer panting, zer heaving of bosoms ... it calls somezing terrible from within ... ‘(TT)
Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It’s one of those words that describes something that does not make a noise, but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss. (TT)
... Mrs Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts... (TT)
... to the kind of men who seek power, gratitude has very poor keeping qualities. (TT)
Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day. (TT)
...Mrs. Arcanum came downstairs and into the kitchen armed with a lamp, a poker and most importantly with her hair in curlers. The combination would be a winner against all but the most iron-stomached intruder. (TT)
'... I'm useless. I was educated to be useless. What we've always been supposed to do is hang around until there's a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we've mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.' (TT)
Goodmountain grinned. ‘Don’t worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn’t anymore.’
‘What changed his mind?’
‘I reckon it was the dying that did it.’ (TT)
And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term 'in my humble opinion', which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, 'these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed'. (TT)
…everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning – with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic – that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out. (TT)
She’d been a respectable young woman for some time. In certain people, that means there’s a lot of dammed-up disreputability just waiting to burst out. (TT)
Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness, apart from in a very sternly abridged dictionary. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap. (TT)
…sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove. (TT)
‘You don’t think a dress like this would be a bit…forward, do you?’ said Sacharissa, holding the dress against herself.
Rocky looked worried. He hadn’t been hired for his dress sense, and certainly not for his grasp of colloquial Middle Class.
‘You’re quite a lot forward already,’ he opined.
‘I meant make me look like a fast woman!’
‘Ah, right,’ said Rocky, getting there. ‘No. Def’initly not.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. No one could run much in a dress like dat.’ (TT)
Mr. Tulip raised a trembling hand. ‘Is this the bit where my whole life passes in front of my eyes?’ he said.
NO, THAT WAS THE BIT JUST NOW.
‘Which bit?’
THE BIT, said Death, BETWEEN YOU BEING BORN AND YOU DYING. NO, THIS ... MR. TULIP, THIS IS YOUR WHOLE LIFE AS IT PASSED BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE’S EYES... (TT)
‘…a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on…’ (TT)
'... are you sure it's all true?'
'I'm sure it's all journalism', said William.
'And what is that supposed to mean?'
'It means it's true enough for now.' (TT)
'... they know they're on the right side because if they are on it it must be the right side, by definition...' (TT)
The mountains of madness have many little plateaux of sanity. (TT)
DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. (TT)
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN? The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato.
SQUEAK, he said.
Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE. (TT)
What was the worst that could happen?
So many things, he thought as he set out again, that it would be hard to decide which one was the worst. (TT)
'Did I say "thank you?"'
'No, you did not.'
'Oh, dear.'
'No, you noticed that you didn't, so zat is okay,' said Otto. (TT)
'We're on the same side here!'
'No. We're just on two different sides that happen to be side by side.' (TT)
‘The right to free speech is an old Ankh-Morpork tradition.’
‘Good heavens, is it?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘How did that one survive?’ (TT)
‘...Mrs. Tilly, I think you wrote a lovely well-spelled and grammatical letter to us suggesting that everyone under the age of eighteen should be flogged once a week to stop them being so noisy?’
‘Once a day, Mr de Worde,’ said Mrs. Tilly. ‘That’ll teach ‘em to go around being young!’ (TT)
Rocky was supplying some sports news, and while it was unreadable to William he put it in on the basis that anyone keen on sport probably couldn’t read. (TT)
'So ... we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in?'
'Except the public, sir,' said William, trying to keep up.
'Which isn't the same as people and humans.'
'I think it's more complicated than that, sir.' (TT)
‘I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas,’ said Lord Vetinari. (TT)
‘In return, however,’ said the Patrician, ‘I must ask you not to upset Commander Vimes.’ He gave a little cough. ‘More than necessary.’
‘I’m sure we can pull together, sir.’
‘Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress.’ (TT)
'Things that are back to front are often easier to comprehend if they are upside down as well, said Lord Vetinari, tapping his chin with the silver knob of his can in an absent-minded way. 'In life as in politics.' (TT)
…nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth. (TT)
