Prefects Quotes

You're a prefect? Oh Ronnie! That's everyone in the family!" "What are Fred and I? Next door neighbors?

Harry, don't go picking a row with Malfoy, don't forget, he's a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you..." "Wow, I wonder what it'd be like to have a difficult life?" said Harry sarcastically.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

Can't stay long, Mother," he said. "I'm up front, the prefects have got two compartments to themselves-" "Oh, are you a prefect, Percy?" said one of the twins, with an air of great surprise. "You should have said something, we had no idea." "Hang on, I think I remember him saying something about it," said the other twin. "Once-" "Or twice-" "A minute-" "All summer-" "Oh, shut up," said Percy the Prefect.

Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.

Arthur Dent: What happens if I press this button? Ford Prefect: I wouldn't- Arthur Dent: Oh. Ford Prefect: What happened? Arthur Dent: A sign lit up, saying 'Please do not press this button again.

What do we want to be prefects for?” said George, looking revolted at the very idea. “It’d take all the fun out of life.

Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.” “Yeah,” said Harry, “but you, unlike me, are a git.

I feel I owe you another explanation Harry," said Dumbledore hesitantly. "You may, perhaps, wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess...that I rather thought...you had enough responsibility to be going on with." Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore's face into his long silver beard.

Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.

Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" "What?" "I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?" "I'll look. Tell me about the lizards." Ford shrugged again. "Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it." "But that's terrible," said Arthur. "Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.

You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must cofess...that I rather thought...you had enough reponsibility to be going on with." Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore's face into his long silver beard.

Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

The names of the kids with detention were announced at every assembly, and I was always one of them. Always. Every single day. It was a running joke. The prefect would say, ‘Detentions for today…’ and I would stand up automatically. It was like the Oscars and I was Meryl Streep.

Will you stop counting!' snarled Zaphod. 'Yes,' said Ford Prefect, 'in three minutes and thirty-five seconds.

It was true: hope could be unkind. You opened yourself up to the worst of wounds because you wanted to believe that something good could finally happen. But if you didn't? You missed this. This intense and prefect moment in which, while the world was almost literally going to hells all around you, hope and reality blended in a single, perfect note.

Prefects. I had learned this one. Student council types, but with superpowers. They who must be obeyed.

Thank God genuine video phones hadn't been invented. I hadn't even grabbed a towel. Ford Prefect would despair of me.

Oh, that,' said Ginny, giggling. 'Well-Percy's got a girlfriend.' Fred dropped a stack of books on George's head. 'What?' 'It's that Ravenclaw prefect, Penelope Clearwater,' said Ginny. 'That's who he was writing to all last summer. He's been meeting her all over the school in secret. I walked in on them kissing in an empty classroom one day. He was so upset when she was-you know-attacked. You won't tease him, will you?' she added anxiously. 'Wouldn't dream of it,' said Fred, who was looking like his birthday had come early.

When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

Ron held up his badge. Mrs Weasley let out a shriek just like Hermione’s. ‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! Oh, Ron, how wonderful! A prefect! That’s everyone in the family!’ ‘What are Fred and I, next-door neighbours?’ said George indignantly, as his mother pushed him aside and flung her arms around her youngest son.

No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens...

Hello, Harry, dear. I suppose you’ve heard our exciting news?” She pointed to the brand-new silver badge on Percy’s chest. “Second Head Boy in the family!” she said, swelling with pride. “And last,” Fred muttered under his breath. “I don’t doubt that,” said Mrs. Weasley, frowning suddenly. “I notice they haven’t made you two prefects.” “What do we want to be prefects for?” said George, looking revolted at the very idea. “It’d take all the fun out of life.” Ginny giggled. “You want to set a better example for your sister!” snapped Mrs. Weasley.

Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be prefect. There will a will always be challenges, obstacles and less than prefect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.

Pastors are starting to get wily. When people tell my friend, 'I'm not being fed,' he replies, 'I'm prefectly happy to spoon feed my one-year-old. But if I'm still spoon-feeding him when he's five, we've got a problem. Here's a fork. Feed yourself.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious... At first Ford formed a theory to account for this human behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on excercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You are very tall or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty foot well, are you all right?

I said 'dear lady,' " explained Ford Prefect, "because I didn't want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin-

That is another of your odd notions,’ said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing ‘odd’ that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of ‘oddities.

If," ["the management consultant"] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .” “Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!" The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied. “Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.” “How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.” “If you would allow me to continue.. .” Ford nodded dejectedly. “Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut." Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances." The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.

No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes.

All right," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm not from Guildford at all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he said, taking a pull of beer. "Why, do you think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?" Ford gave up. It really wasn't worth bothering at the moment, what with the world being about to end.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible.

Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.

Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.

Only a week away!” said Ernie Macmillan of Hufflepuff, emerging from the crowd, his eyes gleaming. “I wonder if Cedric knows? Think I’ll go and tell him. . . .” “Cedric?” said Ron blankly as Ernie hurried off. “Diggory,” said Harry. “He must be entering the tournament.” “That idiot, Hogwarts champion?” said Ron as they pushed their way through the chattering crowd toward the staircase. “He’s not an idiot. You just don’t like him because he beat Gryffindor at Quidditch,” said Hermione. “I’ve heard he’s a really good student — and he’s a prefect.” She spoke as though this settled the matter. “You only like him because he’s handsome,” said Ron scathingly. “Excuse me, I don’t like people just because they’re handsome!” said Hermione indignantly. Ron gave a loud false cough, which sounded oddly like “Lockhart!

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?

... but that's the beauty of boarding school. I make all my own decisions, small and medium, while the big ones are left up to the Prefect Academy - and as far as boys go, to the only expert I know - Suzanne Santry

He's only got two sides, a bad side and a worse side,

His spirit was willing, but his will was not spirited.

I don't believe it! I don't believe it! Oh, Ron, how wonderful! A prefect! That's everyone in the family!" "What are Fred and I, next-door neighbours?" said George indignantly. – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I was a fool!" Percy roared,so loudly that Lupin nearly dropped his photograph. "I was a pompous prat, I was a- a-" "Ministry loving, family-disowning, power-hungry moron," said Fred. Percy swallowed. "Yes, I was!" "Well, you can't say fairer than that," said Fred, holding out his hand to Percy. Mrs Weasley burst into tears. She ran forwards, pushed Fred aside and pulled Percy into a strangling hug, while he patted her on the back, his eyes on his father. "I'm sorry, Dad," Percy said. Mr Weasley blinked rather rapidly, then he, too, hurried to hug his son. "What made you see sence, Perce?" enquired George. " It's been coming on for a while," said Percy, mopping his eyes under his glasses with a corner of his travelling cloak. "But I had to find a way out and it's not so easy at the Ministry, they're imprisoning traitors all the time. I managed to make contact with Aberforth and he tipped me off ten minutes ago that Hogwarts was going to make a fight of it, so here I am." "Well, we do look to our prefects to take a lead at times such as these," said George, in a good imitation of Percy's most pompous manner. "Now let's get upstairs and fight, or all the good Death Eaters''ll be taken.

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.

The Bible says he was raised not just after the blood-shedding, but by it. This means that what the death of Christ accomplished was so full and so prefect that the resurrection was the reward and vindication of Christ's achievement in death.

Funny people, the Swiss,” he said. “While the rest of us hide our sins, they stuff theirs with liqueur, wrap them in silver paper, add a ribbon, and sell them at the price of gold. The prefect has just sent me a huge box of chocolates from Zurich,

I know, 0 Caesar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience, that thy true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. I know that thou art ready to cover me with gifts, make me prefect of the pretorian guards, and command Tigellinus to be that which the gods made him, a mule-driver in those lands which thou didst inherit after poisoning Domitius. Pardon me, however, for I swear to thee by Hades, and by the shades of thy mother, thy wife, thy brother, and Seneca, that I cannot go to thee. Life is a great treasure. I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasure, but in life there are many things which I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Eome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the inheritance of man; from thee other deeds could not have been expected. But to destroy one's ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in a Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs, — is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Eome stuffs its ears when it hears thee; the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, will be less offensive to me, for I have never been the friend of Cerberus, and I need not be ashamed of his howling. Farewell, but make no music; commit murder, but write no verses; poison people, but dance not; be an incendiary, but play not on a cithara. This is the wish and the last friendly counsel sent thee by the — Arbiter Elegantiae.

Manners, Potter, or I’ll have to give you a detention,’ drawled Malfoy, whose sleek blond hair and pointed chin were just like his father’s. ‘You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Harry, ‘but you, unlike me, are a git, so get out and leave us alone.’ Ron,

I didn’t get voted Head Prefect for no reason,” I say. “You got voted because you kiss teachers’ asses—and I’m not irrational,” Devon mutters.

As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological. Ford Prefect usually played to lose.

of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even,

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious,

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had the fashion of calling everything "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing. Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it's really God - playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - prefect joy.

I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful. I found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.' I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?

Heaven is boring. Didn't you see, in that picture book back when we used to go to school? It's just plain and white and there is not even any color and it's too orderly. Like there will be crazy prefects telling you all the time: Do thus, don't do that, where are your shoes, tuck in your shirt, shhh, God doesn't like it and will punish you, keep your voice low you'll wake the angels, go and wash, you are dirty, Bastard says. Me, when I die I want to go where there's lots of food and music and a party that never ends and we're singing that Jobho song, Godknows says.

Prefect Fang certainly didn’t lack will! But it was you who realized that it was possible to turn a greater power against him, and who did so without hesitation. “You think about how the world works, Novice Zhu, and that—that interests me.

He was wrong, that doesn't make him a villian. That makes him an asshole.

About Parlabane, Brookmyre says: "To fully acknowledge the extent of the debt I owe Douglas Adams - as a reader and a writer - would very possibly crash this server, so I will merely cite one significant example. I am frequently asked who was the inspiration for my investigative journalist Jack Parlabane; whether he has some real-life antecedent or represents some indulgent alter-ego of mine. The truth is that Parlabane was entirely inspired by Ford Prefect: I always adored the idea of a character who cheerfully wanders into enormously dangerous situations and effortlessly makes them much worse.

The only place they registered at all was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away quietly to itself. It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which Ford Prefect habitually wore slung around his neck.

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away. During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day,' or 'You're very tall,' or 'Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?' At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has admitted regarding the suppression of the traditional Mass by Paul VI: “A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden, and when it makes the longing for it seem downright indecent.

There had been romances in my schooldays--but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up.

That idiot, Hogwarts champion?" said Ron as they pushed their way through the chattering crowd toward the staircase. "He's not an idiot. You just don't like him because he beat Gryffindor at Quidditch," said Hermione. "I've heard he's a really good student - and he's a prefect." She spoke as though this settled the matter. "You only like him because he's handsome," said Ron scathingly. "Excuse me, I don't like people just because they're handsome!" said Hermione indignantly. Ron gave a loud false cough, which sounded oddly like "Lockhart!

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake; the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal.

What do we want to be Prefects for?’ said George, looking revolted at the very idea. ‘It’d take all the fun out of life.’ Ginny giggled. ‘You want to set a better example to your sister!’ snapped Mrs Weasley. ‘Ginny’s got other brothers to set her an example, Mother,’ said Percy loftily. ‘I’m going up to change for dinner …’ He disappeared and George heaved a sigh. ‘We tried to shut him in a pyramid,’ he told Harry. ‘But Mum spotted us.’ * Dinner

Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

was Gaunt, however, who truly loved the roof perch. He liked watching boys dipping in and out of Fletcher Hall to pilfer biscuits, prefects swanning across the grass in Court, the organ master coming out of Chapel. It soothed him to see the school functioning without him, and to know that he was above it.

That's what happens when you've had great success in life—when you've achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.

Nobody ever wants to do anything except what they are not allowed to do.

About two hours afterwards Gethryn discovered a suitable retort, but, coming to the conclusion that better late than never does not apply to repartees, refrained from speaking it.

Sometimes the only workable solution isn't a fair one

He sounds like Percy,’ said Ron, wrinkling his nose in disgust. ‘Prefect, Head Boy – probably top of every class.

Uma das coisas que Ford Prefect jamais conseguiu entender em relação aos seres humanos era seu hábito de afirmar e repetir continuamente o óbvio mais óbvio.

Prefect Romero, the impossible is merely the possible For which we don't yet know the science.

Six pints of bitter.' said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. 'And quickly please, the world's about to end.

Mrs. Weasley let out a shriek just like Hermione’s. “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! Oh, Ron, how wonderful! A prefect! That’s everyone in the family!

wonky brass scales and old cloaks covered in potion stains they found Percy, deeply immersed in a small and deeply boring book called Prefects Who Gained Power.

The sweat stood out cold on Ford Prefect’s brow, and slid round the electrodes strapped to his temples. These were attached to a battery of electronic equipment—imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers—all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance of the poet’s thought was lost.

I don’t have the faintest idea why the Prefect does what he does, but he seems to want everyone in Candar to pay tariffs to him and feels that he shouldn’t have to pay tariffs to anyone.

He could only assume that he had just won. “So,” continued Ford Prefect, “if you would just like to come over here and lie down …” “What?” said Mr. Prosser. “Ah, I’m sorry,” said Ford, “perhaps I hadn’t made myself fully clear. Somebody’s got to lie in front of the bulldozers, haven’t they? Or there won’t be anything to stop them driving into Mr. Dent’s house, will there?

Incredible!’ breathed Arthur. ‘The people . . . ! The things . . . !’ ‘The things,’ said Ford Prefect quietly, ‘are also people.’ ‘The people . . .’ resumed Arthur, ‘the . . . other people . . .

They wrapped themselves in animal skins and furs which Ford Prefect acquired by a technique he once learned from a couple of ex-Pralite monks running a mind-surfing resort in the Hills of Hunian.

In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers. Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his villa outside Rome. Twice he offered his resignation; twice Nero refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience could allow him to believe such promises.

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious...If humans don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

We are able to find true strength and rest only inside of ourselves. Our very body is a sanctuary and a generator of energy. When things are hard and confusing, go inside. the place can provide you with prefect rest.

At that moment the dull sound of a rumbling crash from outside filtered through the low murmur of the pub, through the sound of the jukebox, through the sound of the man next to Ford hiccuping over the whiskey Ford had eventually bought him. Arthur choked on his beer, leaped to his feet. "What's that?" he yelped. "Don't worry," said Ford, "they haven't started yet." "Thank God for that," said Arthur, and relaxed. "It's probably just your house being knocked down," said Ford, downing his last pint. "What?" shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford's spell was broken. Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window. "My God, they are! They're knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford?" "It hardly makes any difference at this stage," said Ford, "let them have their fun.

I'll do the jokes,' snarled Ford. 'No,' said Harl. 'You will do the restaurant column.' ... 'You what?' said Ford. 'No. Me Harl. You Prefect. You do restaurant column. Me editor. Me sit here tell you you do restaurant column. You get?

Boy doesn’t know what the Wocket is,” Ted said mournful y to the rest of the group. “And his dad’s the owner of the famous Marauder’s Map. Just think how much easier this would be if we could get our hands on that bit of skul duggery. James, let me introduce you to the rest of the Gremlins, a group you may indeed hope to join, depending on how things go tonight, of course.” Ted stopped, turned and threw his arm wide, indicating the three others skulking along with them. “My number one, Noah Metzker, whose only flaw is his unwitting relationship to his fifth-year prefect brother.” Noah bowed curtly at the waist, grinning. “Our treasurer,” Ted continued, “if we ever manage to come across any coin, Sabrina Hildegard.

Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body? It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them. Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox. "Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal. "Braised in a white wine sauce?" "Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper. "But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer." Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively. "Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again. "Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added. "You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford. "Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes. "I don't mean anything." "That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard." "What's the problem, Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump. "I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur. "It's heartless." "Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod. "That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "All right," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..." The Universe raged about him in its death throes. "I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered. "May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months." "A green salad," said Arthur emphatically. "A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur. "Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?" "Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am." It managed a very slight bow. "Glass of water please," said Arthur. "Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years." The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said. "I'll just nip off and shoot myself." He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane." It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen. A matter of minutes later the waiter arrived with four huge steaming steaks.

The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room.

In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall,or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?

You know what?’ Ron murmured, looking over at the bar with enthusiasm. ‘We could order anything we liked in here. I bet that bloke would sell us anything, he wouldn’t care. I’ve always wanted to try Firewhisky –’ ‘You – are – a – prefect,’ snarled Hermione. ‘Oh,’ said Ron, the smile fading from his face. ‘Yeah …

In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people translates itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened. Are you capable of forgiving and accepting in love a world which has disappointed you by not being perfect, a world in which there is so much unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime, earthquake and accident? Can you forgive its imperfections and love it because it is capable of containing great beauty and goodness, and because it is the only world we have? Are you capable of forgiving and loving the people around you, even if they have hurt you and let you down by not being perfect? Can you forgive them and love them, because there aren't any perfect people around, and because the penalty for not being able to love imperfect people is condemning oneself to loneliness? Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not prefect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? And if you can do these things, will you be able to recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world?

She's so pretty, isn't she? Beautiful, really. That prefect skin, those long legs. And that hair! It's so black. Black as a raven's feather, that's what my mother used to say. Do you know, Ellie, what a group of ravens is called? [...] It's called an Unkindness. Isn't that strange? An Unkindness. Well... it's something to think about.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

The Constitution was framed in order to form a more perfect union, not to establish mass confusion.

Great to see you big boy, how's the noise? You're looking great, really very, very fat and unwell. Amazing.

United we stand Or divided, we will fall.

Yes,” said Ford Prefect, “it’s dark.” “No light,” said Arthur Dent. “Dark, no light.” One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior.

And noted all the things he wished to fix up for the feast I think we’ll have a pastry, yes, of peas and onions, sage and cress I think we’ll have an egg soufflé or tartlet at the least I think we’ll have a roast of squash, full of flavor, nothing posh I think we’ll have a soup of greens with warm and toasty bread A meal of oats to warm the heart, I think would make a lovely start And jugs of wine with berries spiced the prefect shade of red

I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be “nicely inconspicuous.” He had simply mistaken the dominant life form.

Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies

You're ambitious, Achille. You've become the chief of detectives in record time, and there's talk you'll be the prefect someday, or even a cabinet minister. You'll have all the temptations of high office--honors, titles, bribes. As for your 'improvements,' see what people think of them when you try to change the world at their expense. You can make your own cross and climb your Calvary; in the end you'll die and the world will go on as messed up as it was before.

There was a moment's suspense while Conscience and Sheer Wickedness fought the matter out inside him, and then Conscience, which had started on the encounter without enthusiasm, being obviously flabby and out of condition, threw up the sponge.

Are all your family wizards?" asked Harry, who found Ron just as interesting as Ron found him. "Er- yes, I think so," said Ron. "I think Mom's got a second cousin who's an accountant, but we never talk about him." "So you must know loads of magic already." The Weasleys were clearly one of those old wizarding families the pale boy in Diagon Alley had talked about. "I heard you went to live with Muggles," said Ron. "What are they like?" "Horrible- well, not all of them. My aunt and uncle and cousin are, though. Wish I'd had three wizard brothers." "Five," said Ron. For some reason, he was looking gloomy. "I'm the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I've got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left- Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy's a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good marks and everyone thinks they're really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it's no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I've got Bill's old robes, Charlie's old wand, and Percy's old rat." Ron reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fat gray rat, which was asleep. "His name's Scabbers and he's useless, he hardly ever wakes up. Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn't aff- I mean, I got Scabbers instead." Ron's ears went pink. He seemed to think he'd said too much, because he went back to staring out of the window.

Ginny – what did you see Percy doing, that he didn’t want you to tell anyone?’ ‘Oh, that,’ said Ginny, giggling. ‘Well – Percy’s got a girlfriend.’ Fred dropped a stack of books on George’s head. ‘What?’ ‘It’s that Ravenclaw Prefect, Penelope Clearwater,’ said Ginny. ‘That’s who he was writing to all last summer. He’s been meeting her all over the school in secret. I walked in on them kissing in an empty classroom one day. He was so upset when she was –you know – attacked. You won’t tease him, will you?’ she added anxiously.

My lawsuit,” he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r’s, “is a very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I’ve employed here in Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He’s a slug, who drives in his coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom is bought up by our prefect. That’s my lawsuit!

Let me repeat: the stakes are high. We must confront one of the most massive pseudo-evidences in recent intellectual history: the belief, rampant in Europe since only two or three centuries ago, in the existence of 'religions' - and more than that, against the unverified faith in the existence of faith. Faith in the existence of 'religion' is the element that unites believers and non-believers, in the present as much as in the past. It displays a single-mindedness that would make any prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome green with envy. No one who overcame religion ever doubted its existence, even if they opposed every single one of its dogmas. No denial ever confronted the denier with the question of whether its name was justified, and whether it had any lasting value in such a form. It is only because society has grown accustomed to a comparatively recent fiction - it did not come into use until the seventeenth century - that one can speak today of a 'return of religion'.' It is the unbroken faith in religion as a constant and universal factor which can vanish and return that forms the foundation of the current legend.

From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the “Battle of Algiers,” history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers (see) which —three decades on—I still find deeply moving. Teitgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to “the question”?

Lovegood had got out The Quibbler again. Meanwhile, at the Hufflepuff table Ernie Macmillan was one of the few still staring at Professor Umbridge, but he was glassy-eyed and Harry was sure he was only pretending to listen in an attempt to live up to the new prefect’s badge gleaming on his chest. Professor Umbridge did not seem to notice the restlessness of her audience. Harry had the impression that a full-scale riot could have broken out under her nose and she would have ploughed on with her speech. The teachers, however, were still listening very attentively, and Hermione seemed to be drinking in every word Umbridge spoke, though, judging by her

Ravi has such nice manners--probably because he is English, and isn’t it a fact that English people have better manners than Americans? He says sorry a lot. “Sorry, can I just…” “Sorry?” His accent is charming, I keep saying pardon so he’ll speak again. For my part, I try to lighten the mood with questions about England. I ask him why English people call private school public school, if his public school was anything like Hogwarts, if he’s ever met the royal family. His answers are: because they are open to the paying public; they had head boys and head girls and prefects but no Quidditch; and he once saw Prince William at Wimbledon, but only the back of his head.

What we see on Palm Sunday are two parades. One from the west and one from the east. One where Caesar’s Prefect of Judea rides a warhorse and one where God’s anointed Messiah rides a donkey. One is a military parade projecting the power of empire—the Roman Empire. The other is a prophetic parade announcing the arrival of an alternative empire—the kingdom of God. One parade derives its power from a willingness to crucify its enemies. The other derives its power by embracing the cross and forgiving its enemies. One is a perpetuation of the domination systems of empire. The other is the only hope the world has for true liberation. The question is, which parade will we march in?

Una de las cosas que a Ford Prefect le había costado más trabajo entender de los humanos era su costumbre de repetir y manifestar continuamente lo que era a todas luces muy evidente; como “Hace buen día”, ”Es usted muy alto” o “¡Válgame Dios!, parece que te has caído a un pozo de treinta metros de profundidad, ¿estás bien?”. Al principio, Ford elaboró una teoría para explicarse esa conducta extraña. Si los seres humanos no dejan de hacer ejercicio con los labios, pensó, es probable que la boca se les quede agarrotada. Tras unos meses de meditación y observación, rechazó aquella teoría a favor de una nueva: si no continúan haciendo ejercicio con los labios, pensó, su cerebro empieza a funcionar.

Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry that scalded his throat. —Other hand! shouted the prefect of studies. Stephen drew back his maimed and quivering right arm and held out his left hand. The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together with the palms and fingers in a livid quivering mass. The scalding water burst forth from his eyes and, burning with shame and agony and fear, he drew back his shaking arm in terror and burst out into a whine of pain. His body shook with a palsy of fright and in shame and rage he felt the scalding cry come from his throat and the scalding tears falling out of his eyes and down his flaming cheeks.

The Round Market was going through tumultuous years. It was old, and as Gonat caught in his ear, it had originated during the Muddy Epoch. Once lively and crowded with shops in a huge circle, the market now shrank to a few trading cubbyholes, located out of the square — as God commanded it. Between them, under clay shacks, and often just side by side, the urban poor lived. The market has had no walls or entrances for a long time. The prefect’s guards had tried to put things in order here, demolishing the shacks, setting up benches in proper order, and resettling the guilty merchants from the Boastful Market. For some time, the market held on, but it was inhabited by so many muddle-headed people and thieves that everything had returned to its former chaos.

The stability of the Glitter Band depends on social cohesion, Mister Garlin. We don’t have standing armies, we don’t have a citizen militia. Even the local constabularies constitute a vanishingly small proportion of our population. But this system only functions in the absence of malicious fear-mongering. I have no time for those who disseminate lies and half-truths for their own ends.

Zaphod's attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato's limo. His mouths hung open. "That," he said, "that ... is really bad for the eyes ..." Ford looked. He too stood astonished. It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!" Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love. The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. "Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip. Zaphod moved forward to it, slowly, like a man possessed - or more accurately like a man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke it. His hand stopped. His hand reached out to stroke it again. His hand stopped again. "Come and feel the surface," he said in a hushed voice. Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped. "You ... you can't ..." he said. "See?" said Zaphod, "it's just totally frictionless. This must be one mother of a mover ..." He turned to look at Ford seriously. At least, one of his heads did - the other stayed gazing in awe at the ship. "What do you reckon, Ford?" he said. "You mean ... er ..." Ford looked over his shoulder. "You mean stroll off with it? You think we should?" "No." "Nor do I." "But we're going to, aren't we?" "How can we not?

Bir BBS dedi, bizim göremediğimiz veya görmediğimiz ya da beynimizin görmemize izin vermediği bir şeydir, çünkü onun başka birinin sorunu olduğunu düşünürüz. İşte BBS'nin anlamı budur. Başka Birinin Sorunu. Beyin onu hemen yok eder, o adeta kör bir noktadır. Eğer ona doğrudan bakarsan, tam olarak ne olduğunu bilmediğin sürece hiçbir şey göremezsin. Tek şansın göz ucuyla onu gafil avlamaktır.

Suddenly a violent noise leaped at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. “Shush!” said Ford. “Listen, it might be important.” “Im … important?” “It’s the Vogon captain making an announcement on the tannoy.” “You mean that’s how the Vogons talk?” “Listen!” “But I can’t speak Vogon!” “You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.” Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur’s ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English. This is what he heard … * Ford Prefect’s original name is only pronounceable in an obscure Betel-geusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford’s father, magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came to live on Betelgeuse Five, where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue. Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as “boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.

Una delle cose che Ford Prefect aveva sempre trovato difficile comprendere a proposito degli umani, era che questi avevano il vizio di affermare e ripetere cose assolutamente ovvie, come risultava evidente da frasi quali Che bella giornata! o Come sei alto! o Oddio, mi sembra che tu sia caduto in un pozzo profondo nove metri: ti sei fatto male? In un primo tempo Ford si era fatto una sua teoria per spiegare questo strano comportamento. Aveva pensato che le bocche degli esseri umani dovessero continuamente esercitarsi a parlare per evitare di rimanere inceppate. Dopo avere osservato e riflettuto alcuni mesi, Ford aveva abbandonato questa teoria per un’altra. Aveva pensato che se gli esseri umani non si esercitavano in continuazione ad aprire e chiudere la bocca, corressero il rischio di cominciare a far lavorare il cervello.

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking." "You keep saying them," Dreyfus said. "For a reason," Stasov answered.

Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about. “Yes,” he agreed with

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

To say that the farmer laughed would be to express the matter feebly. That his young opponent, who had been irritating him unspeakably since the beginning of the game with advice and criticism, should have done exactly what he had cautioned him, the farmer, against a moment before, struck him as being the finest example of poetic justice he had ever heard of, and he signalized his appreciation of the same by nearly dying of apoplexy.

Now, Potter,” said McGonagall, “you and Miss Lovegood had better return to your friends and bring them to the Great Hall--I shall rouse the other Gryffindors.” They parted at the top of the next staircase, Harry and Luna running back toward the concealed entrance to the Room of Requirement. As they ran, they met crowds of students, most wearing traveling cloaks over their pajamas, being shepherded down to the Great Hall by teachers and prefects. “That was Potter!” “Harry Potter!” “It was him, I swear, I just saw him!” But Harry did not look back, and at last they reached the entrance to the Room of Requirement. Harry leaned against the enchanted wall, which opened to admit them, and he and Luna sped back down the steep staircase. “Wh--?” As the room came into view, Harry slipped down a few stairs in shock. It was packed, far more crowded than when he had last been in there. Kingsley and Lupin were looking up at him, as were Oliver Wood, Katie Bell, Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet, Bill and Fleur, and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. “Harry, what’s happening?” said Lupin, meeting him at the foot of the stairs. “Voldemort’s on his way, they’re barricading the school--Snape’s run for it--What are you doing here? How did you know?” “We sent messages to the rest of Dumbledore’s Army,” Fred explained. “You couldn’t expect everyone to miss the fun, Harry, and the D.A. let the Order of the Phoenix know, and it all kind of snowballed.” “What first, Harry?” called George. “What’s going on?” “They’re evacuating the younger kids and everyone’s meeting in the Great Hall to get organized,” Harry said. “We’re fighting.” There was a great roar and a surge toward the foot of the stairs; he was pressed back against the wall as they ran past him, the mingled members of the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore’s Army, and Harry’s old Quidditch team, all with their wands drawn, heading up into the main castle.

Although we can understand how people who were part of a widely disliked minority group might think that they were assailed by the devil, the idea is still dangerous. We should be worried by a powerful church that sees its dissenters as inspired by Satan. The Christians who lived during the reign of the emperor Constantine and later did not extend to pagans the toleration they had asked for generations before. They destroyed pagan shrines and temples, and stories of Christian mobs attacking Roman prefects and swarming around pagan religious centers are surprisingly common. With the legalization of Christianity, Christians turned—in the words of historian Hal Drake—from lambs into lions.53 Their violence was legitimized by the fact that they were Christian and in a martyr-led war against Satan. There was, for some, no difference between dying as a martyr under Decius and dying while trying to destroy a pagan temple. In the words of the fifth-century monk Shenoute, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”54

Macrinus was a Moor by birth, from [Mauretania] Caesarea, and the son of most obscure parents, so that he was very appropriately likened to the ass that was led up to the palace by the spirit; in particular, one of his ears had been bored in accordance with the custom followed by most of the Moors. But his integrity threw even this drawback into the shade. As for his attitude toward law and precedent, his knowledge of them was not so accurate as his observance of them was faithful. It was thanks to this latter quality, as displayed in his advocacy of a friend's cause, that he had become known to Plautianus, whose steward he then became for a time. Later he came near perishing with his patron, but was unexpectedly saved by the intercession of Cilo, and was appointed by Severus as superintendent of traffic along the Flaminian Way. From Antoninus he first received some brief appointments as procurator, than was made prefect, and discharged the duties of this office in a most satisfactory and just manner, in so far as he was free to follow his own judgment. Book 79 - 11

For the second day running you have burnt my toast!” Let me explain this ludicrous remark. You were this particular prefect’s fag. That meant you were his servant, and one of your many duties was to make toast for him every day at teatime. For this, you used a long three-pronged toasting fork, and you stuck the bread on the end of it and held it up before an open fire, first one side, then the other. But the only fire where toasting was allowed was in the library, and as teatime approached, there were never less than a dozen wretched fags all jostling for position in front of the tiny grate. I was no good at this. I usually held it too close and the toast got burnt. But as we were never allowed to ask for a second slice and start again, the only thing to do was to scrape the burnt bits off with a knife. You seldom got away with this. The prefects were expert at detecting scraped toast. You would see your own tormentor sitting up there at the top table, picking up his toast, turning it over, examining it closely as though it were a small and very valuable painting. Then he would frown, and you knew you were for it. So now it was night-time and you were down in the changing room in your dressing gown and pajamas, and the one whose toast you had burnt was telling you about your crime. “I don’t like burnt toast.” “I held it too close. I’m sorry.” “Which do you want? Four with the dressing gown on, or three with it off.” “Four with it on,” I said. It was traditional to ask this question. The victim was always given a choice. But my own dressing gown was made of thick brown camel’s hair, and there was never any question in my mind that this was the better choice. To be beaten in pajamas only was a very painful experience, and your skin nearly always got broken. But my lovely dressing gown stopped that from happening. The prefect knew, of course, all about this, and therefore whenever you chose to take an extra stroke and kept the dressing gown on, he beat you with every ounce of his strength. Sometimes he would take a little run, three or four neat steps on his toes, to gain momentum and thrust, but either way, it was a savage business.

The auditory cortex, as an example, processes the sound inputs that have not already been gated earlier in the stream. It specifically works with tone, pitch, harmony, loudness, and beat patterning or timing. In people that use auditory inputs as a primary or major area of sensory processing musicians for instance there is much less gating of sound in the deeper levels of the brain than in nonmusicians. In consequence, much more sound input reaches the auditory cortex. Because the auditory cortex is continually used to work with larger amounts of sound inflows (with more subtlety), it becomes highly developed and shows tremendous plasticity, that is, continuous new neuronal development. Frances Densmore, for example, the ethnomusicologist who recorded thousands of Native plant songs in the early twentieth century, could perceive pitch differentiations as tiny as 1/32 in deviation. (She had as well total recall and prefect pitch.) The more a sensory modality is consciously used to analyze incoming sensory inflows, the more sensitive it becomes, and the larger the neural network within it becomes.

There was a scuffling and a great thump: Someone else had clambered out of the tunnel, overbalanced slightly, and fallen. He pulled himself up on the nearest chair, looked around through lopsided horn-rimmed glasses, and said, “Am I too late? Has it started? I only just found out, so I--I--” Percy spluttered into silence. Evidently he had not expected to run into most of his family. There was a long moment of astonishment, broken by Fleur turning to Lupin and saying, in a wildly transparent attempt to break the tension, “So--’ow eez leetle Teddy?” Lupin blinked at her, startled. The silence between the Weasleys seemed to be solidifying, like ice. “I--oh yes--he’s fine!” Lupin said loudly. “Yes, Tonks is with him--at her mother’s--” Percy and the other Weasleys were still staring at one another, frozen. “Here, I’ve got a picture!” Lupin shouted, pulling a photograph from inside his jacket and showing it to Fleur and Harry, who saw a tiny baby with a tuft of bright turquoise hair, waving fat fists at the camera. “I was a fool!” Percy roared, so loudly that Lupin nearly dropped his photograph. “I was an idiot, I was a pompous prat, I was a--a--” “Ministry-loving, family-disowning, power-hungry moron,” said Fred. Percy swallowed. “Yes, I was!” “Well, you can’t say fairer than that,” said Fred, holding out his hand to Percy. Mrs. Weasley burst into tears. She ran forward, pushed Fred aside, and pulled Percy into a strangling hug, while he patted her on the back, his eyes on his father. “I’m sorry, Dad,” Percy said. Mr. Weasley blinked rather rapidly, then he too hurried to hug his son. “What made you see sense, Perce?” inquired George. “It’s been coming on for a while,” said Percy, mopping his eyes under his glasses with a corner of his traveling cloak. “But I had to find a way out and it’s not so easy at the Ministry, they’re imprisoning traitors all the time. I managed to make contact with Aberforth and he tipped me off ten minutes ago that Hogwarts was going to make a fight of it, so here I am.” “Well, we do look to our prefects to take a lead at times such as these,” said George in a good imitation of Percy’s most pompous manner. “Now let’s get upstairs and fight, or all the good Death Eaters’ll be taken.

Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted. Most people were chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests. They were worried and irritated—but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities. The Prefect’s riposte to criticisms echoed by the press—Could not the regulations be modified and made less stringent?—was somewhat unexpected. Hitherto neither the newspapers nor the Ransdoc Information Bureau had been given any official statistics relating to the epidemic. Now the Prefect supplied them daily to the bureau, with the request that they should be broadcast once a week. In this, too, the reaction of the public was slower than might have been expected. Thus the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination. For one thing, all the three hundred and two deaths might not have been due to plague. Also, no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death-rate in ordinary times. The population of the town was about two hundred thousand. There was no knowing if the present death-rate were really so abnormal. This is, in fact, the kind of statistics that nobody ever troubles much about—notwithstanding that its interest is obvious. The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth. For in the fifth week there were three hundred and twenty-one deaths, and three hundred and forty-five in the sixth. These figures, anyhow, spoke for themselves. Yet they were still not sensational enough to prevent our townsfolk, perturbed though they were, from persisting in the idea that what was happening was a sort of accident, disagreeable enough, but certainly of a temporary order. So they went on strolling about the town as usual and sitting at the tables on café terraces. Generally speaking, they did not lack courage, bandied more jokes than lamentations, and made a show of accepting cheerfully unpleasantnesses that obviously could be only passing. In short, they kept up appearances.

Um imenso animal leiteiro aproximou-se da mesa de Zaphod Beeblebrox. Era um enorme e gordo quadrúpede do tipo bovino, com olhos grandes e protuberantes, chifres pequenos e um sorriso nos lábios que era quase simpático. – Boa noite – abaixou-se e sentou-se pesadamente sobre suas ancas –, sou o Prato do Dia. Posso sugerir-lhes algumas partes do meu corpo? – Grunhiu um pouco, remexeu seus quartos traseiros buscando uma posição mais confortável e olhou pacificamente para eles. Seu olhar se deparou com olhares de total perplexidade de Arthur e Trillian, uma certa indiferença de Ford Prefect e a fome desesperada de Zaphod Beeblebrox. – Alguma parte do meu ombro, talvez? – sugeriu o animal. – Um guisado com molho de vinho branco? – Ahn, do seu ombro? – disse Arthur, sussurrando horrorizado. – Naturalmente que é do meu ombro, senhor – mugiu o animal, satisfeito –, só tenho o meu para oferecer. Zaphod levantou-se de um salto e pôs-se a apalpar e sentir os ombros do animal, apreciando. – Ou a alcatra, que também é muito boa – murmurou o animal. – Tenho feito exercícios e comido cereais, de forma que há bastante carne boa ali. – Deu um grunhido brando e começou a ruminar. Engoliu mais uma vez o bolo alimentar. – Ou um ensopado de mim, quem sabe? – acrescentou. – Você quer dizer que este animal realmente quer que a gente o coma? – cochichou Trillian para Ford. – Eu? – disse Ford com um olhar vidrado. – Eu não quero dizer nada. – Isso é absolutamente horrível – exclamou Arthur -, a coisa mais repugnante que já ouvi. – Qual é o problema, terráqueo? – disse Zaphod, que agora observava atentamente o enorme traseiro do animal. – Eu simplesmente não quero comer um animal que está na minha frente se oferecendo para ser morto – disse Arthur. – É cruel! – Melhor do que comer um animal que não deseja ser comido – disse Zaphod. – Não é essa a questão – protestou Arthur. Depois pensou um pouco mais a respeito. – Está bem – disse –, talvez essa seja a questão. Não me importa, não vou pensar nisso agora. Eu só... ahn... O Universo enfurecia-se em espasmos mortais. – Acho que vou pedir uma salada – murmurou. – Posso sugerir que o senhor pense na hipótese de comer meu fígado? Deve estar saboroso e macio agora, eu mesmo tenho me mantido em alimentação forçada há meses. – Uma salada verde – disse Arthur, decididamente. – Uma salada? – disse o animal, lançando um olhar de recriminação para ele. – Você vai me dizer – disse Arthur – que eu não deveria comer uma salada? – Bem – disse o animal –, conheço muitos legumes que têm um ponto de vista muito forte a esse respeito. E é por isso, aliás, que por fim decidiram resolver de uma vez por todas essa questão complexa e criaram um animal que realmente quisesse ser comido e que fosse capaz de dizê-lo em alto e bom tom. Aqui estou eu! Conseguiu inclinar-se ligeiramente, fazendo uma leve saudação. – Um copo d’água, por favor – disse Arthur. – Olha – disse Zaphod –, nós queremos comer, não queremos uma discussão. Quatro filés malpassados, e depressa. Faz 576 bilhões de anos que não comemos. O animal levantou-se. Deu um grunhido brando. – Uma escolha muito acertada, senhor, se me permite. Muito bem – disse –, agora é só eu sair e me matar. Voltou-se para Arthur e deu uma piscadela amigável. – Não se preocupe, senhor, farei isso com bastante humanidade.

Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his voice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry. "Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles." Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent. "If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead." His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual. His voice rocked us. "To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa. Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear" – did I hear a note of distaste there? – "red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue. You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand. You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

ever since Eugène Poubelle had become prefect of the Seine and issued strict laws governing street cleaning and garbage collection (thus giving his name to the French trash can).

Percy, who hadn’t noticed that Fred had bewitched his prefect badge so that it now read “Pinhead,

Loiselle shifted his gaze to the Prefect, supervising the arrests, before returning to Daniel. “Don’t shy away from the truth. It’s an amazing thing, to be willing to die for each other.

But as to the wish that the form of the Church should be ascertained by some kind of vain pomp, how perilous it is I will briefly indicate, rather than explain, that I may not exceed all bounds. What they say is, that the Pontiff, who holds the apostolic see, and the priests who are anointed and consecrated by him, provided they have the insignia of fillets and mitres, represent the Church, and ought to be considered as in the place of the Church, and therefore cannot err. Why so? because they are pastors of the Church, and consecrated to the Lord. And were not Aaron and other prefects of Israel pastors? But Aaron and his sons, though already set apart to the priesthood, erred notwithstanding when they made the calf (Exod. 32:4). Why, according to this view, should not the four hundred prophets who lied to Ahab represent the Church? (1 Kings 22:11, &c.). The Church, however, stood on the side of Micaiah. He was alone, indeed, and despised, but from his mouth the truth proceeded. Did not the prophets also exhibit both the name and face of the Church, when, with one accord, they rose up against Jeremiah, and with menaces boasted of it as a thing impossible that the law should perish from the priest, or counsel from the wise, or the word from the prophet? (Jer. 18:18). In opposition to the whole body of the prophets, Jeremiah is sent alone to declare from the Lord (Jer. 4:9), that a time would come when the law would perish from the priest, counsel from the wise, and the word from the prophet. Was not like splendour displayed in that council when the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees assembled to consult how they might put Jesus to death? Let them go, then, and cling to the external mask, while they make Christ and all the prophets of God schismatics, and, on the other hand, make Satan’s ministers the organs of the Holy Spirit!

Horrible — well, not all of them. My aunt and uncle and cousin are, though. Wish I’d had three wizard brothers.” “Five,” said Ron. For some reason, he was looking gloomy. “I’m the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I’ve got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left — Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy’s a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good marks and everyone thinks they’re really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it’s no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I’ve got Bill’s old robes, Charlie’s old wand, and Percy’s old rat.” Ron reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fat gray rat, which was asleep. “His name’s Scabbers and he’s useless, he hardly ever wakes up. Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn’t aff — I mean, I got Scabbers instead.” Ron’s ears went pink. He seemed to think he’d said too much, because he went back to staring out of the window. Harry didn’t think there was anything wrong with not being able to afford an owl. After all, he’d never had any money in his life until a month ago, and he told Ron so, all about having to wear Dudley’s old clothes and never getting proper birthday presents. This seemed to cheer Ron up.

I was never a prefect myself," said Tonks brightly. "My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities." "Like what?" asked Ginny, who was choosing a baked potato. "Like the ability to behave myself.

Percy, who hadn’t noticed that Fred had bewitched his prefect badge so that it now read “Pinhead,” kept asking them all what they were sniggering at.

One imagines that similar scenes of joy erupted throughout the world wherever two or three faithful Catholics gathered together. In contrast, the election of Ratzinger was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new Pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the Pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.” Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the Rottweiler who had courageously stopped them from doing so!

Percy, deeply immersed in a small and deeply boring book called Prefects Who Gained Power. “A study of Hogwarts prefects and their later careers,” Ron read aloud off the back cover. “That sounds fascinating. . . .” “Go away,” Percy snapped. “’Course, he’s very ambitious, Percy, he’s got it all planned out. . . . He wants to be Minister of Magic . .

Doug thought about Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who, in the nineteenth century, tore down and rebuilt Paris. Before Haussmann, Paris had been a filthy rat’s nest of shit-covered streets. So he did what was needed, even though it wasn’t the most popular course of action. The historian Réné Héron de Villefosse once said: “The old ship of Paris was torpedoed by Baron Haussmann and sunk during his reign. It was perhaps the greatest crime of the megalomaniac prefect, and also his biggest mistake. His work caused more damage than a hundred bombings.

What’s the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

the presence of a lively anti-Semitism, particularly in France. Its origin lay with the ‘state Jews’, an elite almost absent in Germany or Austria, but particularly flourishing in Britain, France and Italy. Under the Third Republic, hundreds of Jews reached the summits of French public service: prefects, generals, state counsellors, deputies, senators and ministers, not to mention a large number of scholars and scientists admitted to the most prestigious cultural institutions such as the Collège de France.

So then I tried to borrow Hermes —” “Who?” “The owl Mum and Dad bought Percy when he was made prefect,” said Fred from the front. “But Percy wouldn’t lend him to me,” said Ron. “Said he needed him.

He felt older than he had ever felt in his life, and it seemed extraordinary to him that barely an hour ago he had been worried about a joke shop and who had gotten a prefect’s badge.

Find them? That I did,’ cried Riose. His lips were stiff as he spoke. It seemed to require effort to refrain from grinding molars. ‘Patrician, they are not magicians; they are devils. It is as far from belief as the outer nebulae from here. Conceive it! It is a world the size of a handkerchief, of a fingernail; with resources so petty, power so minute, a population so microscopic as would never suffice the most backward worlds of the dusty prefects of the Dark Stars. Yet with that, a people so proud and ambitious as to dream quietly and methodically of Galactic rule. ‘Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence. ‘And they succeed. There is no one to stop them. They have built up a filthy trading community that curls its tentacles about the systems further than their toy ships dare reach. For parsecs, their Traders – which is what their agents call themselves

Manners, Potter, or I’ll have to give you a detention,” drawled Malfoy, whose sleek blond hair and pointed chin were just like his father’s. “You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.

What do we want to be Prefects for?’ said George, looking revolted at the very idea. ‘It’d take all the fun out of life.

You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess . . . that I rather thought . . . you had enough responsibility to be going on with.” Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore’s face into his long silver beard.

A small request like that, who am I to turn it down? There is something you can do for me in return, though, especially now that you’re practically on our doorstep.” Dreyfus bristled. “Just for once, it would be nice if someone did something for me without any strings attached.” “Not the world we live in, Prefect,” Seraphim commiserated, as if they were equal victims of the same system.

Once Ratzinger said in passing that education should not seek to take anything away from the other; it should have the humility simply to accompany the student’s own thinking and help them to mature.

I’m sorry, Head Prefect,” he said, “it shall not happen again.” “It had better not, but I shall not demerit you as I want the mood during this trip to be positive. Remember you are on village business and to acquit yourself with restraint, dignity and if at all possible, without anyone being eaten by a tree.” He then wished us good spooning and strode off.

I feel I owe you another explanation, Harry,” said Dumbledore hesitantly. “You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess . . . that I rather thought . . . you had enough responsibility to be going on with.” Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore’s face into his long silver beard.

There is something magnificent in the performance and the inexorability of ceremony. However tired, however long the journey, he walks with dignity and, when all is said and done, majesty. So it will be here, entering by the Gate of the Sun between the trumpets and the troops, the prefect at his side, the guard and the priests accompanying him: he will enter his city, coming like a bridegroom to an unfamiliar bride. He will see her with the certainty of possession, she him with wonder, curiosity and fear. So Hadrian will walk up the dizzying white steps to the temple, slowly but without pausing for breath, always standing forward of his retinue so that the crowds may see him – not so far forward that they may reach him, but near enough that they feel they could.

Hadrian was fortunate that for much of his reign he had an indispensable and indefatigable supporter in the Rome city prefect, Marcius Turbo. Turbo, who replaced the equally sound Annius Verus in this crucial role, occupied it for over fifteen years. As guardian of Hadrian’s interests in Rome, Turbo impressed all who saw him as a man of the greatest generalship . . . Prefect or commander of the Praetorians. He displayed neither softness nor haughtiness in anything that he did, but lived like one of the multitude; among other things, he spent the entire day near the palace and often he would go there even before midnight, when some of the others were just beginning to sleep.

the Pope and Father Gabriele Amorth, the Catholic Church’s chief exorcist, who have both spoken against Harry Potter in the media (the Pope did so before he became Pope, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and was a prefect for the congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position frequently described as the Church’s devil’s advocate).

The oldest boy came striding into sight. He had already changed into his billowing black Hogwarts robes, and Harry noticed a shiny red-and-gold badge on his chest with the letter P on it. “Can’t stay long, Mother,” he said. “I’m up front, the prefects have got two compartments to themselves —” “Oh, are you a prefect, Percy?” said one of the twins, with an air of great surprise. “You should have said something, we had no idea.” “Hang on, I think I remember him saying something about it,” said the other twin. “Once —” “Or twice —” “A minute —” “All summer —” “Oh, shut up,” said Percy the Prefect.

The candles all went out at once. The only light now came from the silvery ghosts, who were drifting about talking seriously to the prefects, and the enchanted ceiling, which, like the sky outside, was scattered with stars. What with that, and the whispering that still filled the hall, Harry felt as though he were sleeping outdoors in a light wind.

Think of the soldiers who serve under our generals, and with what order, obedience, and submissiveness they perform the things which are commanded them. Not all are prefects, nor commanders of a thousand, nor of a hundred, nor of fifty, nor the like, but each one in his own rank performs the things commanded by the king and the generals. The great cannot subsist without the small, nor the small without the great. There is a kind of mixture in all things, and thence arises mutual advantage.

You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.” “Yeah,” said Harry, “but you, unlike me, are a git, so get out and leave us alone.” Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Neville laughed. Malfoy’s lip curled.

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One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried abut the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

All the boys really liked her, especially because she was dumb—when anyone spoke to her she just blinked in an appealingly dumb way. So anyway, when we are being Marina Aquamarina, as well as floating around with our arms by our sides we are not allowed to speak, just shake our heads and blink. So, for instance, if a prefect said, “Where is your beret?” you could only blink and stare and then float off quickly.

Katherine Woodward Thomas (2004) writes, “What you have is a reflection of what you believe you can have, and your relationships are a prefect mirror of your relationship to yourself”.

In the murk ahead of them a pair of blazing torches indicated the entrance to the forum, with a pair of sentries standing guard in front of the high archway. Before the tribune had any chance to explain their presence to the surprised soldiers a legion centurion walked out of the courtyard beyond them, stopping with a start of surprise when he saw the newcomers. Staring with narrowed eyes at the three centurions’ unfamiliar armour and crested helmets, he was further taken aback when he realised who it was they were escorting. Scaurus allowed the silence to play out for a few seconds, watching the calculation in the legion officer’s face before speaking in an acerbic tone designed to communicate his status. ‘Yes, Centurion, this is a senior officer’s uniform, and yes, Centurion, you’re supposed to have your hand in the air some time about now.’ The other man saluted quickly, his face reddening with embarrassment, while the sentries worked hard but not entirely successfully at keeping the smirks off their faces. ‘I’m sorry, Prefect, it’s just that we weren’t expecting to receive any reinforcement.’ Marcus looked at Julius, wondering if his colleague was going to correct the legion man’s mistaken identification, but his questioning gaze was answered only by a slight shake of the big man’s head. Scaurus nodded to the centurion, looking over his shoulder at the dimly visible administrative building on the other side of the forum’s open courtyard. ‘That’s perfectly understandable, Centurion, because we’re not reinforcements. If you’ll show me to your tribune . . .?

There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of a mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium: the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastocrators, the Grand Logothete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylas, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts and the cataphracts; the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Asian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch, and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and Armenia, the Exarchs of Ravenna and Carthage, the Nomarch of Tarentum, the Catapan of Bari, the Abbot of Studium. As a reward for bringing good tidings, I had by this time assumed the Captaincy of the Varangian Guard; and there they were, beyond the galleons and the quinqueremes in corruscating ranks of winged helmets, clashing their battle axes in homage.

you don’t find love, love finds you. There’s no logic to it and once it has a hold of you, there’s no going back. I guess love doesn’t have to be prefect, it just has to be true…                                    

As for the scenes we shared in the Piazza Unita that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. The last passenger liner sailed long ago. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared. No tram has crossed the piazza for years. The Caffe Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct. The Governor's Palace is now only the Palace of the Prefect and the Lloyd Austriaco headquarters, having metamorphosed into Lloyd Triestino when the Austrians left, are now government offices: wistfully the marble tritons blow their their horns, regretfully Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures. Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band.

Prefect, sir, their quibbling and bickering only now touched on the subject. You know how they can get carried away.” “Do I ever.” Pilate looked back around at the council. “You may be seated.” They took their seats. Pilate paraded to the center of the room, the center of attention. He snapped his fingers for Longinus to join him. Pilate looked at Caiaphas and said, “Beside me is Marcus Lucius Longinus. I have tasked him with tracking down some particularly egregious Jewish rebels. One of them goes by the name of Jesus Barabbas. Do you have any intelligence on him?” Caiaphas said, “No, my prefect.” “And what of his comrades, the brothers Demas and Gestas Samaras?” “No, my prefect.” “What good are you to me, Caiaphas, if you don’t keep on top of your own people, and their rebel leaders?

As they settled, he then heard Annas say, “Why did you downplay the Nazarene? You know his influence is on the rise. And the signs and wonders are not being discounted as ‘parlor tricks.’ They are spreading like wildfire. You heard what the prefect said, if this rebellion keeps up, Rome will come and take away both our place and our nation.

Josephus was considered the main source for the history of Judea and, as a tireless historian, boldly proclaimed he would leave out nothing of consequence to Jewish history in his chronicles. He had served as governor of Galilee, and at the beginning of the Jewish war with Rome, 66 A.D., was a general of the Roman forces in Galilee. A few decades earlier, according to the Gospels, Jesus attracted great crowds to Judea. But Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews did not record the savior story we read in the Christian gospels. He did cover many major and minor details of the period, even reporting a number of deeds and decrees of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect that, according to the gospels, allowed the Sanhedrin to condemn Jesus to death.

Gallio submits a request to the Prefect of the Province of Judaea, in writing, to bring in a disciple from the leadership group. He doesn’t care which one, probably Peter. The way Cassius Gallio sees it he can play Peter off against Judas: the two former colleagues in separate rooms, neither of them sure what the other may confess. Then in the same room, to wonder how much pain the other can bear. Not that the interviews need descend into violence. The anticipation of pain is often enough. Pilate refuses Gallio’s request, also in writing. He’s covering his back. Pilate has seen no evidence to incriminate the disciples, and this is the Middle East. The zealots in the mountains are unpredictable, and in this particular region a riot could start a war. Cassius Gallio should avoid inflaming the situation, and an arrest would be a negative at this time.

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Not only was Prefect Mutz waiting for them, but his boss, Director General Jacques Gisquet, and his boss’s boss, Minister of the Interior Pierre Blot, were waiting for them. Neville saw this as a sign that they were taking her accusations seriously. Simon saw the potential for something very different, but before he could stop his boss, she started in.

In the words of Jaurès, ‘there was in the history of the red flag an ambiguous period in which its meaning oscillated between the past and the future.’ It seems that it takes its current significance from a sort of semiotic reversal: deployed by the royal authorities during the executions of sans-culottes, the latter appropriated it and began to make of it their emblem (this occurred with the insurrection of 10 August 1792, when the revolutionary crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace, put an end to the monarchy and established the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic in September). It reappeared in 1830 and, like the barricade, became the symbol of the insurgents in all the revolutions of 1848. After the violent repression of June 1848 and the ‘bloody week’ that crushed the Paris Commune in May 1871, counterrevolution made the red colour an object of fetishistic demonization; nothing red could be tolerated, and burning red fabrics became a ritual of purification and a practice of public safety. In 1849, Léon Faucher, the state secretary of the first conservative republican government, issued a circular letter directed to the prefects that contained very precise instructions: ‘The red flag is a plea for insurrection; the red cap recalls blood and mourning; bearing these sad marks means provoking disobedience.’ Therefore the government ordered the immediate banishment of those ‘seditious emblems’. After the Paris Commune, a witness wrote in his memoirs that the city was seized by ‘a crazy rage against all that was red: clothes, flags, ideas, and language itself …’ The colour red, he explained, had become ‘a mortal disease’ whose return should be avoided absolutely, as we do ‘the plague and the cholera’.

Pope Benedict was “framed” in a media set-up that no longer permitted serious reporting.’ The result: ‘Pope Benedict’s papacy, which had begun so brilliantly in 2005, increasingly developed into a “serial breakdown papacy”.’ Every appearance by the pope promised the media new negative headlines.’ The reporting on the pope and the church also showed a trend towards ‘tabloidization’, a way of presenting news ‘with a striking style in both design and content that does not just seek to inform, but also specifically aims at forming’ opinion. There was the ‘expectation of failure’, a mechanism that survived by satisfying those expectations. Journalists themselves did not now ‘expect to consider what the pope had said of interest about the relation between faith and reason or on the global economy, but to look out for mistakes’. That lack of ethics had had ‘a decisive influence on the media images of Pope Benedict’. Now it was often just a matter of ‘exposing the pope’:

he then coined the term ‘desecularization’ (Entweltlichung). Indeed, a church becoming more like Christ necessarily had ‘to differ sharply from the world around it’, he quoted from Pope Paul VI. It had to ‘distance itself’, we could say ‘desecularize itself’. Jesus became human ‘not just to confirm the world in its worldliness and be its companion’ and then leave it as it was. No, a church that ‘settles in this world, is self-satisfied and conforms to the world’s standards’ contravened its founder’s mission, ‘to be an instrument of salvation, imbued with God’s word’ and thus ‘be not of the world’. The pope expressly made clear that necessary ‘desecularization’ also included the church’s charitable works and its ‘organization and institution’. For ‘a church freed from material and political burdens and privileges can devote itself to the whole world better and in a truly Christian way. […] It opens itself to the world, not in order to win people for an institution with its own claims to power, but to bring them to themselves.

On board the plane to Edinburgh, Benedict made his standpoint clear. When a journalist asked him whether the church should urgently do something to become more attractive, he answered with a plain ‘No’. The church did not sell anything, least of all itself. It was not entrusted with goods but with a message, which it had to pass on in full.

Are Class Captains and School Prefects managers or leaders? Schools miss it when they assign a student to discipline other students. Class captains and school prefects are leaders not managers. A Leader is on A MISSION not on A DUTY. And being a leader goes beyond expecting compliance from others, which is what managers do. If your school assigns prefect to enforce compliance in any way you are doing it all wrong. For one, seeking compliance from anyone is complicated and it comes with a position that "demands" respect and thus you are putting such children at a risk of being hated by their peers. Prefect should be examples not authority figures, plus they should be trained to act like leaders should, if you also don't train them, you are doing it too wrong. Here are some of those "things" you should train your prefect: 1. Active listening 2. How to help their peers and other students find meaning in learning 3. How to make others students wellbeing and safety their priority. 4. How to inspire others and lead by example. Charity begins from school too. Your prefects can learn people skills that can guarantee their future right from your school. Your prefects should be assets to your school because of what they can learn to do now to become better in future not because of what they can do for your school now, which obviously is very little.

perfect is boring , human is beautiful

You’re starting to sound a bit like our dear older brother, you are, Ron. Carry on like this and you’ll be made a Prefect.’ ‘No, I won’t!’ said Ron hotly.

In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?

Producing the prefect concrete has become a kind of philosopher’s stone of the late 20th century.

Ron had not asked Dumbledore to give him the prefect badge. Was he, Harry, Ron's best friend in the world, going to sulk because he didn't have a badge, laugh with the twins behind Ron's back, ruin this for Ron when, for the first time, he had beaten Harry at something?