Postal 4 Quotes

ALWAYS REMEMBER that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it also worked on non-vampires.

true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.

People were strange like that. Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.

Did she go postal?” Russell grins at him, “You know, for pullin’ her portal on the island and sendin’ her to your safe house before the fight?” “Define postal?” Zephyr counters, his brows pulling together further. “Insanely angry,” Russell says. “Yes,” Zephyr nods his head adamantly, pointing at him. “She has not called me ‘sweetie’ since.” “Oooo,” Russell says, ducking his head and wrinkling his nose. “Doghouse.

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

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

An imagination is a terrible thing to bring along.

He made a noise like an owl. Since Moist was no ornithologist, he did this by saying “woo woo.

You are aware, are you, that painting a few stars on a perfectly ordinary broomstick doesn’t mean it will get airborne?

Moist made a mental note: envelopes with a stamp already on, and a sheet of folded paper inside them: Instant Letter Kit, Just Add Ink! That was an important rule of any game: always make it easy for people to give you money.

A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, 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 people he was their fault.

Nevertheless, he picked up a piece of smashed chair. It had splintered nicely. And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it also worked on non-vampires.

all freedom is limited, artificial, and therefore illusory, a shared hallucination at best. No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.

GENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON, Death hinted. THEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE. “I Will Stay Here, Please.” HERE? THERE’S NOTHING TO DO HERE, said Death. “Yes, I Know,” said the ghost of the golem. “It Is Perfect. I Am Free.

Stanley always followed the rules. All sorts of things could go wrong if you didn't. So far he'd done 1:Upon Discovery of the Fire, Remain Calm. Now he'd come to 2: Shout 'Fire!' in a Loud, Clear Voice. 'Fire!' he shouted, and then ticked off 2 with his pencil. Next was: 3: Endeavour to Extinguish Fire If Possible. Stanley went to the door and opened it. Flames and smoke billowed in. He stared at them for a moment, shook his head, and shut the door. Paragraph 4 said: If Trapped by Fire, Endeavour to Escape. Do Not Open Doors If Warm. Do Not Use Stairs If Burning. If No Exit Presents Itself Remain Calm and Await a) Rescue or b) Death.

Well is it said: ‘See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you’ll have a pin.

Hobson was big and heavyset, but not exactly fat; he was probably what you’d get if you shaved a bear.

Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?

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

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

best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is busy,” said Vetinari.

He dreaded the supermarket line chitchat. He waited until the postal service lady had knocked on the door, left the package, and gotten in her vehicle to open his door. His dog dying had been bad, I could tell, but the worst part for him had been trying to figure out how to handle the pity of the vet assistants.

The machine couldn’t be stopped and certainly shouldn’t be destroyed, the wizard said. Destroying the machine might well cause this universe to stop existing, instantly. On the other hand, the Post Office was filling up, so one day Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow had gone into the room with a crowbar, had ordered all the wizards out, and belted the machine until things stopped whirring. The letters ceased, at least. This came as a huge relief, but nevertheless, the Post Office had its Regulations, and so the chief postal inspector was brought before Postmaster Cowerby and asked why he had decided to risk destroying the whole universe in one go. According to Post Office legend, Mr. Rumbelow had replied: “Firstly, sir, I reasoned that if I destroyed the universe all in one go, no one would know; secondly, when I walloped the thing the first time, the wizards ran away, so I surmised that unless they has another universe to run to they weren’t really certain; and lastly, sir, the bloody thing was getting on my nerves. Never could stand machinery, sir.

Everyone had their levers. Often it was greed. Greed was a reliable old standby. Sometimes it was pride. That was Groat’s lever. He desperately wanted promotion; you could see it in his eyes. Find the lever, and then it was plain sailing.

no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.

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.

They’d saved the city with gold more easily, at that point, than any hero could have managed with steel. But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever—provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look. This is known as Finance.

No need to be like that, sir,” said Groat levelly. “No need to be like that. You can’t destroy the mails. You just can’t do it, sir. That’s Tampering With The Mail, sir. That’s not just a crime, sir. That’s a, a—” “Sin?” said Moist. “Oh, worse’n a sin,” said Groat, almost sneering. “For sins you’re only in trouble with a god, but in my day, if you interfered with the mail, you’d be up against Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow. Hah! And there’s a big difference. Gods forgive.

The coins had weighed out at an average of 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale.

Cuanto más se le intenta ocultar algo a un niño, más empeño pone este en encontrarlo, ya sea un dulce o una postal de coristas descocadas dándoles vuelo a sus encantos.

The postal station smelled of fried onions and potato soup.

It’s a salad bar, they say, it’s got the kind of stuff salad bars have, if it was surprising it wouldn’t be a salad bar, you’re not here to look at it. What do you expect to find? Rhino chunks? Pickled coelacanth?

While most ‘pinheads’ do indeed begin with a casually acquired flashy novelty pin, followed by the contents of their grandmothers’ pincushion, haha, the path to a truly worthwhile collection lies not in the simple disbursement of money in the nearest pin emporium, oh no. Any dilettante can become ‘kingpin’ with enough expenditure, but for the true ‘pinhead’ the real pleasure is in the joy of the chase, the pin fairs, the house clearances, and, who knows, a casual glint in the gutter that turns out to be a well-preserved Doublefast or an unbroken two-pointer. Well is it said: ‘See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you’ll have a pin.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government?

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.

ALWAYS REMEMBER that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. People

They don’t have a knife for stabbing rich, murdering bastards?” she said. “They bring it to the table when you order one,” said Moist urgently.

Pity about all that publicity when the hamster smashed its way out of its treadmill and ate that man’s leg before flying away, but that was Progrethth for you.

It’s a totally mad idea,” said Mad Al, grinning. “I’m glad you like it,” said Moist.

Ink! That was an important rule of any game: always make it easy for people to give you money.

Hm, hm, gent reader, is your entire kin well? Allow me; you might want, perhaps, [4] to learn now from me what “kinsfolks” means exactly? Well, here’s what kinsfolks are: we are required to pet them, [8] love them, esteem them cordially, and, following popular custom, come Christmas, visit them, or else congratulate them postally, [12] so that for the rest of the year they will not think about us.

Mr. Pony struggled manfully with the engineer’s permanent dread of having to commit himself to anything, and managed, “Well, if we don’t lose too many staff, and the winter isn’t too bad, but of course there’s always—

It was a stamp. It was a yellowy-green color. It showed—Moist peered—a field of cabbages, with some buildings on the horizon. He sniffed. It smelled of cabbages. Oh, yes. “Printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli, sir,” said Stanley, full of pride. “‘A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains,’ sir. I think it might do very well. Cabbages are so popular, sir. You can make so many things out of them!” “Well, I can see that—” “There’s cabbage soup, cabbage beer, cabbage fudge, cabbage cake, cream of cabbage—” “Yes, Stanley, I think you—” “—pickled cabbage, cabbage jelly, cabbage salad, boiled cabbage, deep-fried cabbage—” “Yes, but now can—” “—fricassee of cabbage, cabbage chutney, cabbage Surprise, sausages—” “Sausages?” “Filled with cabbage, sir. You can make practically anything with cabbage, sir. Then there’s—” “Cabbage stamps,” said Moist terminally.

You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs.

They even carried slingshots loaded with very hard acorns, in case they met up with dangerous mail bandits along their postal route. This was unlikely, as they only needed to go up a flight of stairs.

It was breathtaking. If Moist von Lipwig had been a career killer, it would have been like meeting a man who’d devised a way to destroy civilizations.

These were feral, urban birds that lived on what they could find on the streets—Ankh-Morpork streets, at that. They were bobbing, cooing plague pits. You might as well eat a dog-turd burger and wash it down with a jumbo cup of septic tank.

Ray Scott was a federal postal inspector—the dude carried a gun and cuffs; I’d grow muscles when the neighborhood kids would see him. He promised his four kids that he’d pay our college tuition if we maintained a 2.0 grade point average. After my sophomore year, I was skating along with a 2.7. Dad said he was restructuring our deal—he’d only pay if I kept a 3.0 or better. “That’s crap,” I said. That wasn’t the deal. It wasn’t fair—a common refrain from my teenagers today. But then something happened: In the fall of my junior year, I was heavily involved with my fraternity, I played club football, and I posted a 3.2 GPA. The next semester, I upped that to 3.6. The following one, 3.4. I remained pissed until years later, when it dawned on me: Dad knew I was better than a 2.7 student. And he knew I needed to be pushed. Funny, isn’t it, how much smarter our dads are when we get older?

They’d made a crook the messenger of the gods, and piled on his charred desk the sum of all their hopes and fears . . . badly punctuated, true, in smudged pencil or free Post Office ink, which had spluttered across the paper in the urgency of writing.

jacquard

Good gods, the madness is catching, Moist thought as the glow of the golem’s eyes disappeared into darkness outside. I’m not the postmaster, I’m some poor bastard who’s the victim of some stupid . . . experiment. What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

HOW COULD PEOPLE be so stupid? They seemed to cling to ignorance because it smelled familiar.

They were, by their own standards, honest men, in that they only did what they knew or suspected that everyone else did, and there was never any visible blood,

I’m some poor bastard who’s the victim of some stupid…experiment. What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

The voice went into his head, bored down through his memories, riffled through his fears, found the right levers, battened onto them, and pulled. In Moist’s case, it found Frau Shambers. In the second year at school, you were precipitated out of the warm, easygoing kindergarten of Frau Tissel, smelling of finger paint, playdough, and inadequate toilet training, and onto the cold benches governed by Frau Shambers, smelling of Education. It was as bad as being born, with the added disadvantage that your mother wasn’t there. Moist

We’ll…we’ll do things that are quite new, in interestin’ ways!

Mr. Lipwig, this morning you had no experience at all of being dead, and yet but for my intervention you would nevertheless have turned out to be extremely good at it,” said Lord Vetinari sharply. “It just goes to show: you never know until you try.

several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant, and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening cooperation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission.” An

Avatar: the living likeness of a god,” said the professor patiently. “The hat with wings. The golden suit.

The common comma had looked at Stanley’s expression and decided not to disturb him.

And that’s when it all went wrong for Mr. Gryle, because Stanley had one of his Little Moments.

The Ekarv method, named after Margareta Ekarv of the Swedish Postal Museum, is a proven set of guidelines, the effectiveness of which has been substantiated by research and has been widely adopted. 1. Use simple language to express complex ideas. 2. Use normal spoken word order. 3. One main idea per line, the end of the line coinciding with the natural end of the phrase. "The robbers were sentenced to death by hanging" is short and to the point. 4. Lines of about 45 letters; text broken into short paragraphs of four or five lines. 5. Use the active form of verbs and state the subject early in the sentence. 6. Avoid: subordinate clauses, complicated constructions, unnecessary adverbs, hyphenating words and the end of lines. 7. Read texts aloud and note natural pauses. 8. Adjust wording and punctuation to reflect the rhythm of speech. 9. Discuss texts with colleagues and consider their comments. 10. Pin draft texts in their final positions to assess affect. 11. Continually reverse and refine the wording. 12. Concentrate the meaning to an "almost poetic level".

must have been caught up when we furled it…

he said. “I don’t know anything about the post!” “Well, sir . . . what did you used to do?” Rob. Trick. Forge. Embezzle.

like a man dreaming with his eyes open.

Grievous Bodily Harmsworth,

Oh, please sue the university!” Ridcully bellowed. “We’ve got a pond full of people who tried to sue the university—

I Have Been Instructed As To The Nature Of Social Untruths, Yes.

Pull the other one, it has got bells on” to

Three and a bit, that’s the ticket. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson said that was untidy, so he designed a wheel where the pie was exactly three. And that’s it, in there.” “But that’s impossible!” said Moist. “You can’t do that! Pi is like . . . built in! You can’t change it. You’d have to change the universe!” “Yes, sir. They tell me that’s what happened

I think I’ll head back to the mountains, he thought as he went down to the cellar. At least the monsters there have the decency to look like ones.

The Times reporter had made an effort, but nothing short of a stampede could have stopped Reacher Gilt in his crazed assault on the meaning of meaning. The Grand Trunk “was about people” and the reporter had completely failed to ask what that meant, exactly? And then there was this piece called “Our Mission” . . .

Meaningless, stupid words, from people without wisdom or intelligence or any skill beyond the ability to water the currency of expression. Oh, the Grand Trunk stood for everything, from life and liberty to Mom’s homemade Distressed Pudding. It stood for everything, except anything.

He wanted to say, oh, how he wanted to say: Craftsmen. D’you know what that means? It means men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush, no matter what you pay them. So I’m employing people as “craftsmen” now who’re barely fit to sweep out a workshop. But you don’t care, because if they don’t polish a chair with their arse all day you think a man who’s done a seven-year apprenticeship is the same as some twerp who can’t be trusted to hold a hammer by the right end. He didn’t say this aloud, because although an elderly man probably has a lot less future than a man of twenty, he’s far more careful about it . . .

We call it . . .the Woodpecker.” “The woodpecker?” “No, not like that. You need, sort of, more of a pause for effect, like . . .the Woodpecker.” “ . . . The Woodpecker,” said Moist, more slowly.

I Did, In Fact, Try To Clean Your Suit With Spot Remover, Sir,” said Mr. Pump. “But Since It Was Effectively Just One Large Spot, It Removed The Whole Suit.

Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was.

infrastructure companies. Amazon is so good at infrastructure that its fastest-growing and most profitable business (AWS) is all about allowing other companies to leverage Amazon’s computing infrastructure. Amazon also makes money by offering Fulfillment by Amazon to other merchants who envy its mastery of logistics, which ought to strike fear into the hearts of frenemies like UPS and FedEx. In addition to its eighty-six gigantic fulfillment centers, Amazon also has at least fifty-eight Prime Now hubs in major markets, allowing it to beat UPS and FedEx on performance by offering same-day delivery of purchases in less than two hours. Amazon has also built out “sortation” centers that let it beat UPS and FedEx on price by shipping small packages via the United States Postal Service for about $ 1 rather than paying FedEx or UPS around $ 4.50.

Pieces of eight!” “Twelve and a half percent!

Upwright

Equally noteworthy is his offhand use of “dungeon master,” a term that Lee Gold also uses in APA-L #510, in reference to her first time serving as referee: “It was a fun game, for the Dungeon-master as well as the players.” This new term certainly derived from the position of “gamesmaster” in postal Diplomacy, a title that goes back as far as 1963 (see Section 4.3).

He felt that sense of shifting ground you experience when you realize that you’re dealing with someone whose world is connected with your own only by their fingertips. Not a hermit, he thought, but more like a shipwrecked mariner, living in this dry desert island of a building while the world outside moves on and all sanity evaporates.

Of course not. Not as such. But . . . but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say, ‘Yes please, I’ll have 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 table d’hôte or nothing, otherwise . . . well, it could get silly.

ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. People like a show . . .

En en tout cas un symbole qui me paraît, sinon très vrai, du moins assez beau, c'est ce qui s'est passé le dernier jour de la vie consciente de Nietzsche, puisque le 3 janvier 1889 Nietzsche dans une rue de Turin s'est jeté à la tête d'un cheval en pleurant et s'est effondré. Cette scène est simple, elle est connue. Ce qui est tout à fait curieux, ce qui est tout à fait symbolique, me semble-t-il, c'est que son ami Peter Gast a reçu quelques jours après une carte postale qui était datée du 4 janvier 1889. Il est probable que Nietzsche venait précisément de déposer cette carte dams la boîte aux lettres au moment où il s'est effondré dans la rue. Et cette carte postale est étonnante, quand on la compare au grand délire qui avait immédiatement précédé la crise. Quand on compare la carte postale de Peter Gast à ce délire antérieur à la crise, on est tout à fait étonné, on se trouve devant une sorte d'éblouissante simplicité qui fait penser aux derniers poèmes de Hölderlin; en tout cas cette carte postale qu'il avait envoyé à celui qu'il avait tant aimé, à Peter Gast, qu'il appelait 'mon maestro Pietro', elle dit ceci: 'Chante-moi une chanson nouvelle; le monde est transfiguré et tous les cieux se réjouissent.

A smooth tongue was not much help in rough trousers.