Nation Terry Pratchett Quotes

Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?

No more words. We know them all, all the words that should not be said. But you have made my world more perfect.

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

Don't look back!" "Why not?" "Because I just did! Run faster!

The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.

Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.

Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.

What did they feed the lions and tigers with in the ark, sir?

They obeyed, as wise men do when a woman puts her foot down . . .

I notice you didn't laugh, Mr. Black!' 'No, Your Majesty. We are forbidden to laugh at the things kings say, sire, because otherwise we would be at it all day.

Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn't have to muck it out once a week.

When much is taken, something is returned.

Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science.

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds.

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day.

She felt better for all that. A good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren't.

This was not the time to say “I don’t know.” The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn’t be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried...and then his mind caught alight. That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day." For some reason the books of etiquette that Daphne's grandmother had forced on her didn't quite deal with this. Of course, silly people would say to babies, "You're so sweet I could gobble you all up!" but that sort of nonsense seemed less funny when it was said by a man in war paint who owned more than one skull. Daphne, cursed with good manners, settled for "It's very kind of you to say so.

It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose.

Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.

The Universe isn’t just a light show, they keep it running during the day too.

Science is not interested in what stands to reason.

One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.

It takes an unusual man to make up a hymn in a hurry, but such a man was Captain Roberts. He knew every hymn in The Antique and Contemporary Hymn Book, and sang his way through them loudly and joyously when he was on watch, which had been one of the reasons for the mutiny.

I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, agreement or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no 'should

That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.

[...]And his head is on fire with new things[...]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.

Captain Roberts went to Heaven, which wasn't everything that he'd expected, and as the receding water gently marooned the wreck of the Sweet Judy on the forest floor, only one soul was left alive. Or possibly two, if you like parrots.

Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought.

And perhaps at the other end of the world there is a place where the screaming can’t be heard, and I may find it in my heart to grant God absolution!

If you don’t dare to think you might, you won’t.

They saw that the perfect world is a journey, not a place.

A good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren’t.

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

He'd missed dogs. Dogs added something that even people didn't, and one of the dogs was sitting by his feet, here in the darkness and the gentle rain. It wasn't bothered much about the rain or what might be out there on the unseen sea, but Mau was a warm body moving about in a sleeping world and might at any moment do something that called for runnung around and barking. Occasionally it looked up at him adoringly and made a slobbery gulping noise which possibly meant "Anything you say, boss!

She said to me, "This is fun." "It weirdly is," I said. "Maybe these are our salad days." "Huh?" "You know. Happy." "What's happy about a salad?" She shrugged. "Ranch," she said.

Some of the men and older boys were trained in firing the cannon, but since there wasn’t any gun powder to spare for actually firing any more of the things, they made do with pushing wooden cartridges into the barrel and shouting, “Bang!” They got quite good at that, and were proud at the speed with which “Bang!” could be shouted. Daphne said she hoped the enemy would be trained to say “Aargh!

...You want a special truth. *You* want the truth to be a truth that *you* like. You want it to be a pretty little truth that fits what you already believe!

You didn't have to know Pilu for long to see that he floated through life like a coconut on the ocean. He always bobbed up. There was some sort of natural spring of cheerfulness that bubbled to the surface. Sadness was like a cloud across the sun, soon past. Sorrow was tucked away somewhere in his head, locked up in a cage with a blanket over it, like the captain's parrot.

He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition.

So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overhead remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…

HOW IMO MADE THE WORLD, IN THE TIME WHEN THINGS WERE OTHERWISE AND THE MOON WAS DIFFERENT

I asked for reasons, and here they are, yelling and smelling and demanding, the last people in the world, and I need them.

Sometimes you laugh because you're alive when you really shouldn't be.

It Takes A Lifetime To Learn How To Die

I’d be very worried if I saw a man singing the national anthem and waving the flag, sir. It’s really a thing foreigners do.

And they thought that was all you had to have, because they took for granted the most important thing. You had to have a place where you belonged.

She’d had a cousin like that – Botney was his name – who never left a frog unsquashed, a kitten unkicked, or a spider unflattened. In the end, she’d accidentally broken two of his fingers under the nursery rocking horse, told him she’d put wasps down his trousers next time if he didnn’t mend his ways, and then burst into tears when people came running. You didn’t come from a family of ancient fighters like hers without at least a pinch of ruthlessness

That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be.

One of my ancestors fought in the War of the Roses“, she announced haughtily, without looking round, “and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow in the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That’s what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight

He preached as if he had a flaming sword in his hand. Bats fell out of the rafters. The organ started up by itself. The water sloshed in the font.

People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then. And what they need most of all is nothing much happening. And

You weren't supposed to shoot people, especially if you hadn't even been introduced to them...

You didn’t want to be a warrior?” “Never. It takes a woman nine months to make a new human. Why waste her effort?

I told you Imo made many worlds. I told you that sometimes I think I can see a little way into the world where the wave did not happen. Well, now you will get onto that ship, or... you won't. Whatever you choose, your choice will mean there are two new worlds. And perhaps sometimes, on the edge of sleep, we will see the shadow of the other world. There will be no unhappy memories.

Vergiss nie", hatte sie immer wieder und allzu oft betont, "dass nur einhundertachtunddreißig Personen sterben müssen, damit dein Vater König wird! Und das bedeutet, dass du eines Tages vielleicht eine Königin bist!

Sie war sich ziemlich sicher, dass es auch einen weiblichen Apostel gegeben haben muss, und verblüffte Captain Roberts mit ihrer Erklärung: "Unser Herr wird immer in weißen Gewändern dargestellt, also muß irgendwer dafür gesorgt haben, dass er jeden Tag ein sauberes anziehen konnte!

Daphne didn’t know much about the old woman, but apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she’d gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapors and stayed there, still gently vaporizing, until she completely vaporized at the age of eighty-six, apparently because her body was fed up with having nothing to do.

Daphne’s thought in Nation: This was no time to go totally mad. You had to maintain standards.

Hee was swapping all from bill to eye, Hee was swapping all from wing to thigh, His swapping Tool of Generation Out-swappèd all ye Winged Nation. Ho the Blood of King Edward …

Normally people tended to be very quiet in the parish church. Perhaps they were afraid of waking God up in case He asked pointed questions or gave them a test.

Het leven wordt wel erg ingewikkeld als je teveel denkt.

There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war.

They didn’t know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.

the difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!’ ‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ said Daphne hotly. ‘We don’t eat people!’ ‘There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!

Dios was maximum high priest to a national religion that had fermented and accreted and bubbled for more than seven thousand years and never threw a god away in case it turned out to be useful. He knew that a great many mutually-contradictory things were all true. If they were not, then ritual and belief were as nothing, and if they were nothing, then the world did not exist. As a result of this sort of thinking, the priests of the Djel could give mindroom to a collection of ideas that would make even a quantum mechanic give in and hand back his toolbox.

Let’s just run through this again, shall we?” said the Demon King. He leaned back in his throne. “You happened to find the Tezumen one day and decided, I think I recall your words correctly, that they were ‘a bunch of Stone-Age no-hopers sitting around in a swamp being no trouble to anyone,’ am I right? Whereupon you entered the mind of one of their high priests—I believe at that time they worshipped a small stick—drove him insane and inspired the tribes to unite, terrorize their neighbors and bring forth upon the continent a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men should be taken to the top of ceremonial pyramids and be chopped up with stone knives.” The King pulled his notes toward him. “Oh yes, some of them were also to be flayed alive,” he added. Quezovercoatl shuffled his feet. “Whereupon,” said the King, “they immediately engaged in a prolonged war with just about everyone else, bringing death and destruction to thousands of moderately blameless people, ekcetra, ekcetra. Now, look, this sort of thing has got to stop.” Quezovercoatl swayed back a bit. “It was only, you know, a hobby,” said the imp. “I thought, you know, it was the right thing, sort of thing. Death and destruction and that.” “You did, did you?” said the King. “Thousands of more-or-less innocent people dying? Straight out of our hands,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. Straight off to their happy hunting ground or whatever. That’s the trouble with you people. You don’t think of the Big Picture. I mean, look at the Tezumen. Gloomy, unimaginative, obsessive…by now they could have invented a whole bureaucracy and taxation system that could have turned the minds of the continent to slag. Instead of which, they’re just a bunch of second-rate axe-murderers. What a waste.

Let’s just run through this again, shall we?” said the Demon King. He leaned back in his throne. “You happened to find the Tezumen one day and decided, I think I recall your words correctly, that they were ‘a bunch of Stone-Age no-hopers sitting around in a swamp being no trouble to anyone,’ am I right? Whereupon you entered the mind of one of their high priests—I believe at that time they worshipped a small stick—drove him insane and inspired the tribes to unite, terrorize their neighbors and bring forth upon the continent a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men should be taken to the top of ceremonial pyramids and be chopped up with stone knives.” The King pulled his notes toward him. “Oh yes, some of them were also to be flayed alive,” he added. Quezovercoatl shuffled his feet. “Whereupon,” said the King, “they immediately engaged in a prolonged war with just about everyone else, bringing death and destruction to thousands of moderately blameless people, ekcetra, ekcetra. Now, look, this sort of thing has got to stop.” Quezovercoatl swayed back a bit. “It was only, you know, a hobby,” said the imp. “I thought, you know, it was the right thing, sort of thing. Death and destruction and that.” “You did, did you?” said the King. “Thousands of more-or-less innocent people dying? Straight out of our hands,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. Straight off to their happy hunting ground or whatever. That’s the trouble with you people. You don’t think of the Big Picture. I mean, look at the Tezumen. Gloomy, unimaginative, obsessive…by now they could have invented a whole bureaucracy and taxation system that could have turned the minds of the continent to slag. Instead of which, they’re just a bunch of second-rate axe-murderers. What a waste. Quezovercoatl squirmed. The King swiveled the throne back and forth a bit. “Now, I want you to go straight back down there and tell them you’re sorry,” he said. “Pardon?” “Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Tell them that what you really wanted them to do was strive day and night to improve the lot of their fellow men. It’ll be a winner.

It takes an unusual man to make up a hymn in a hurry, but such a man was Captain Roberts. He knew every hymn in The Antique and Contemporary Hymn Book, and sang his way through them loudly and joyously when he was on watch, which had been one of the reasons for the mutiny.

Sentía un enorme vacío en su interior, negro y profundo, más que la oscura corriente. Todo había desaparecido. Nada estaba donde se suponía que debía estar. Ahí estaba él en esa solitaria orilla, y sólo podía plantearse las preguntas tontas que se hacen los niños… ¿Por qué se acaban las cosas? ¿Por qué se mueren las personas? ¿Qué se han propuesto hacer los dioses? Y eso era lo más duro, porque, para el hombre, una de las Cosas Adecuadas consistía en no hacer preguntas tontas.

That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be. So

The gods of Djelibeybi In the river kingdom of Djelibeybi, the national religion

was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing. It

-And that makes it alright? Didn't God say, "Thou shalt not kill"? -Yes, but after that it got complicated.

alight. That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.

You happened to find the Tezumen one day and decided, I think I recall your words correctly, that they were ‘a bunch of Stone-Age no-hopers sitting around in a swamp being no trouble to anyone’, am I right? Whereupon you entered the mind of one of their high priests—I believe at that time they worshipped a small stick—drove him insane and inspired the tribes to unite, terrorise their neighbours and bring forth upon the continent a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men should be taken to the top of ceremonial pyramids and be chopped up with stone knives.” The King pulled his notes towards him. “Oh yes, some of them were also to be flayed alive,” he added. Quezovercoatl

You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

No more words. we know them all, all the words that should not be said. But you have made my world more perfect.

After that he made some fish, but they were stupid and lazy.

A good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren't.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

But the animated display of Dolls of All Nations was definitely in trouble. The musical box underneath was still playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice” but the rods that animated the figures had got twisted out of shape, so that the Klatchian boy was rhythmically hitting the Omnian girl over the head with his ceremonial spear, while the girl in Agatean national costume was kicking a small Llamedosian druid repeatedly in the ear. A chorus of small children was cheering them on indiscriminately.

taking people suspected of being less holy and putting them to death in a hundred ingenious ways. This is considered a reliable barometer of the state of one’s piety in most of the really popular religions. There’s a tendency to declare that there is more backsliding around than in the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, and that it’s time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered very efficient for this purpose.

And Dios knew that Net was the Supreme God, and that Fon was the Supreme God, and so were Hast, Set, Bin, Sot, Io, Dhek, and Ptooie; that Herpetine Triskeles alone ruled the world of the dead, and so did Syncope, and Silur the Catfish-Headed God, and Orexis-Nupt. Dios was maximum high priest to a national religion that had fermented and accreted and bubbled for more than seven thousand years and never threw a god away in case it turned out to be useful. He knew that a great many mutually-contradictory things were all true. If they were not, then ritual and belief were as nothing, and if they were nothing, then that world did not exist. As a result of this sort of thinking, the priests of Djel could give mindroom to a collection of ideas that would make even a quantum mechanic give in and hand back his toolbox.

Oh, the grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up to the top of the hill and crushed all the nations of the world and brought them under the rule of Satan our Master.

In Uberwald the dwarfs and trolls haven’t settled their old grievances, there are large areas controlled by feudal vampire or werewolf clans, and there are also tracts with much higher than normal background magic. It is a chaotic place, indeed, and you’d hardly think you were in the Century of the Fruitbat. It is to be hoped that things will improve, however, and Uberwald will, happily, be joining the community of nations.” Vimes and Vetinari exchanged looks. Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

Huge untapped reserves of coal and iron ore,” said Carrot. “And fat, of course. The best candles, lamp oils and soap come ultimately from the Shmaltzberg deposits.” “Why? We’ve got our own slaughterhouse, haven’t we?” “Ankh-Morpork uses a great many candles, sir.” “It certainly doesn’t use much soap,” said Vimes. “There are so many uses for fats and tallows, sir. We couldn’t possibly supply ourselves.” “Ah,” said Vimes. The Patrician sighed. “Obviously I hope that we may strengthen our trading links with the various nations within Uberwald,” he said. “The situation there is volatile in the extreme. Do you know much about Uberwald, Commander Vimes?” Vimes, whose knowledge of geography was microscopically detailed within five miles of Ankh-Morpork and merely microscopic beyond that, nodded uncertainly.

Voor sommige mensen is er maar één goed moment voor het juiste woord. Dat is erg jammer, maar er schijnt niets aan gedaan te kunnen worden.

Denken Komt voor in dit boek. Of je het ook thuis wilt proberen moet je zelf beslissen.

Oh, the grand old Duke of York He had Ten Thousand Men He Marched them Up To The Top of The Hill And Crushed all the nations of the world and brought them under the rule of Satan our master.

Once upon a time nations fought like great grunting beasts in a swamp. Ankh-Morpork ruled a large part of that swamp because it had the best claws. But today gold has taken the place of steel and, my goodness, the Ankh-Morpork dollar seems to be the currency of choice. Tomorrow . . . perhaps the weaponry will be just words. The most words, the quickest words, the last words.

Look, you know what I mean. You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

Angua always says that nakedness is the national costume everywhere, sarge.

So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…