Discworld 33 - Going Postal

The people who guard the rainbow don’t like those who get in the way of the sun.

SOMETIMES THE TRUTH is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.

The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.

“Silence,” said Vetinari.

It wasn’t a very loud word, but it had an effect rather like that of a drop of black ink in a glass of clear water. The word spread out in coils and tendrils, getting everywhere. It strangled the noise.

I don’t have to prove anything. I said this is about words, and how you can twist them, and how you can spin them in people’s heads so that they think the way you want them to. We’ll send a message of our own, and do you know what? The boys in the towers will want to send it, and when people know what it says they’ll want to believe it, because they’ll want to live in a world where it’s true.

I’ll kill you in our special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. I’ll take away everything but your life. I’ll take away your money, your reputation, and your friends. I’ll spin words around you until you’re cocooned in them. I’ll leave you nothing, not even hope .

He always raised the stakes, automatically. Never promise to do the possible. Anyone could do the possible. You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.

They hadn’t dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they’d imagined a different world, and bent metal around it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this . . . thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight

You know how to pray, don’t you? You just put your hands together—and hope.”

Gods tend to be more interested in prophets, not profits