Adrian P > Recent Status Updates

"You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.

The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?

I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man. one vet. Everyone has the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. It's a very enlightened civilization.

We're really good at it, Teppic thought. Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no."

“We fought.'
'A duel?'
'Nothing that formal. A simultaneous decision to murder one another is more like it.”

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows."

"Abandon certainty! That's life's deepest command. That's what life's all about. We're a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can't you hear Muad'Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that's only death disguised! Such a future becomes now!"

“I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in trouble."
"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg.
"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em.”

Government and religion united, and breaking a law became sin. A smell of blasphemy arose like smoke around any questioning of governmental edicts. The guilt of rebellion invoked hellfire and self-righteous judgments.

“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.”

- "We've got a lot of experience of not having any experience"
- "But the point is... the point is... the point is we've not been
experienced for a lot longer than you."

The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

"The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist."

“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let's go.
[They do not move]
[Curtain]

Estragon : Let's go
Valdimir: We can't
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon: Ah!
--------------------
Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

"Sometimes there are no choices. We are swept along in a current not of our own choosing.
She clenched her jaw, teeth grinding.
I will be the current. I will be the course"

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . "

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment."

"I don't think it would be possible for human beings to fail to under and the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive."

"All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in common illusion while living in a common chaos"

"There's no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war."

“He didn’t believe that, surely.” “Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being insulted would only lead to humiliation. And since he didn’t want that, the simplest path to follow was to believe what I said.”

"It seems to me that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy"