The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord.[Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise.]Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one. I think—
The fastest way to travel is to be there already.
The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.
The Empire’s got something worse than whips all right. It’s got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.
The city’s full of people who you just see around.
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 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.
The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.
That’s what prayers are… it’s frightened people trying to make friends with the bully!
That’s the trouble with a brain – it thinks more than you sometimes want it to.