Discworld 17 - Interesting Times

“But … you’ll … die.”

“Oh, that’s part of it, I’ll grant you, that’s part of it. But what a way to go, eh?”

Mr. Saveloy looked at them and realized that they were speaking another language in another world. It was one he had no key to, no map for. You could teach them to wear interesting pants and handle money but something in their soul stayed exactly the same.

He wanted to say: how can you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

The path of the ambitious man was a nightingale floor. One wrong step and it would sing out.

“May you live in interesting times! I would rather die than betray my Emperor!”

“Fair enough.”

It took the captain only a fraction of a second to realize that Cohen, being a man of his word, assumed that other people were too. He might, if he had time, have reflected that the purpose of civilization is to make violence the final resort, while to a barbarian it is the first, preferred, only and above all most enjoyable option. But by then it was too late. He slumped forward.

“I always lives in interestin’ times,” said Cohen, in the satisfied voice of someone who did a lot to keep them interesting.

Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum

Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; “Hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.

The Agatean word for foreigner is the same as the word for ghost, and only one brush stroke away from the word for victim.

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

They’ve got something here worse than whips. They don’t need whips anymore.

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.