Discworld Quotes - Part 4 Taken from the Internet @~Continued from Issue 47 Reaper Man ---------- "You know," said Windle, "it's a wonderful afterlife." "Have you any last words?" YES. I DON'T WANT TO GO. "Well. Succinct, anyway." "What is this thing, anyway?" said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands. "It's called a shovel," said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical." People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. I EXPECT, he said, THAT YOU COULD MURDER A PIECE OF CHEESE? ------------------------------------------------------------------ Witches Abroad Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Yabi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Yabi are renowned for being remarkably short and bad-tempered. Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against any decent swordmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost impossible to develop decent swordmanship when you seem to have run into a food mixer that is biting your ear off. The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people. The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match. Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government. Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Small Gods The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to. There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. The Omnians were a God-fearing people. They had a great deal to fear. The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned. When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror. "What's a philosopher ?" said Brutha. "Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," said a voice in his head. "Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis. "So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water." "He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at." "You're not one of us." "I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine." When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary. The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god). The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish. "All the other prophets came back with commandments!" "Where they get them?" "I ... suppose they made them up." "You get them from the same place." "I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers." "I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy." "That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No One There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles." "Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain - the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn." "You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look." "That's right," he said. "We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am." His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink." Dhblah sidled closer. This was not hard. Dhblah sidled everywhere. Crabs thought he walked sideways. And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!" Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack. "Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words." @~To be continued in Issue 49 - o -