The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.
    *
    ‘Oh, no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things you don’t understand.’
    ‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.’
    *
    Lord Hong had risen to the leadership of one of the most influential families in the Empire by relentless application, total focusing of his mental powers, and six well-executed deaths. The last one had been that of his father, who’d died happy in the knowledge that his son was maintaining an old family tradition. The senior families venerated their ancestors, and saw no harm in prematurely adding to their number.
    *
    ‘Comrades, we must strike at the very heart of the rottenness. We must storm the Winter Palace!’ ‘Excuse me, but it is June.’ ‘Then we can storm the Summer Palace!’
    *
    Lord Hong was playing chess, against himself. It was the only way he could find an opponent of his calibre but, currently, things were stalemated because both sides were adopting a defensive strategy which was, admittedly, brilliant.
    *
    There was this to be said about Cohen. If there was no reason for him to kill you, such as you having any large amount of treasure or being between him and somewhere he wanted to get to, then he was good company.
    *
    ‘You know their big dish down on the coast?’ [said Cohen.]
    ‘No.’
    ‘Pig’s ear soup. Now, what’s that tell you about a place, eh?’
    Rincewind shrugged. ‘Very provident people?’
    ‘Some other bugger pinches the pig … There’s men here who can push a wheelbarrow for thirty miles on a bowl of millet with a bit of scum in it. What does that tell you? It tells me someone’s porking all the beef
    *
    Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you’re trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like ‘What is my purpose in life?’ very quickly lacked both.
    *
    Cohen’s father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero’s creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.
    Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime’s experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse.
    *
    ‘We are a travelling theatre,’ she said. ‘It is convenient. Noh actors are allowed to move around.’
    ‘Aren’t they?’ said Rincewind.
    ‘You do not understand. We are Noh actors.’
    ‘Oh, you weren’t too bad.’
    *
    Merchants always had money. But it seemed wrong to think of it as belonging to them; it belonged to whoever took it off them. Merchants didn’t actually own it, they were just looking after it until it was needed.
    *
    The Silver Horde were honest (from their specialized point of view) and decent (from their specialized point of view) and saw the world as hugely simple. They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.
    And although they didn’t set out to give the money away to the poor, that was nevertheless what they did (if you accepted that the poor consisted of innkeepers, ladies of negotiable virtue, pickpockets, gamblers and general hangers-on), because although they would go to great lengths to steal money they then had as much control over it as a man trying to herd cats. It was there to be spent and lost. So they kept the money in circulation, always a praiseworthy thing in any society.
    *
    Eventually an officious voice said, ‘What do you have to say for yourself, miserable louse?’
    ‘Well, I—’
    ‘Silence!’
    Ah. So it was going to be that kind of interview.
    *
    Six Beneficent Winds had the same sense of humour as a