Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat. (SG)
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly. (SG)
Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. (SG)
One of the recurring philosophical questions is:
‘Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?’
Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in the forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. (SG)
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you. (SG)
Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history … ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just … well, things happening one after another. (SG)
There are fewer metaphors around than people think. (SG)
Many stories start long before they begin … (SG)
…what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods. (SG)
The trouble with being a god is that you’ve got no one to pray to. (SG)
…there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do. (SG)
The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done. (SG)
It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air. (SG)
‘I said, that’s blasphemy!’
‘Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I’m a god!’ (SG)
Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time. (SG)
Brother Preptil, the master of music, had described Brutha’s voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. (SG)
… when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise. (SG)
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. (SG)
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. (SG)
Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, ‘It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting …’ (SG)
It was very hard to tell what Vorbis was thinking, often even after he had told you. (SG)
Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourishes underground. (SG)
Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think. (SG)
‘Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o’course.’ (SG)
Vorbis liked to see properly guilty consciences. That was what consciences were for. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned. (SG)
This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them. (SG)
Hanging around is another thing tortoises are very good at. They’re practically world champions. (SG)
There were twenty-three other novices in Brutha’s dormitory, on the principle that sleeping alone promoted sin. This always puzzled the novices themselves, since a moment’s reflection would suggest that there were whole ranges of sins only available in company. (SG)
You couldn’t put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place where the inevitable just went and waited. (SG)
When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror. (SG)
‘Yes, but humans are more important than animals,’ said Brutha.
‘This is a point of view often expressed by humans,’ said Om. (SG)
If people don’t respect then they won’t fear; and if they don’t fear, how can you get them to believe? (SG)
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. (SG)
They were sheep, possibly the most stupid animal in the universe with the possible exception of the duck. (SG)
Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. (SG)
Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him. (SG)
‘Winners never talk about glorious victories. That’s because they’re the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It’s only the losers who have glorious victories.’ (SG)
‘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. (SG)
‘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…’ (SG)
People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time. (SG)
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We’re philosophers. We think, therefore we am.’ (SG)
The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.*
*Provided that he wasn’t poor, foreign nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous or a woman. (SG)
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.’ (SG)
Didactylos’s thoughts chased after one another with a whooshing noise. No wonder he was bald. Hair would have burned off from the inside. (SG)
‘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.’ (SG)
‘Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.’ (SG)
‘When you’ve got ‘em by the curiosity, their hearts and minds will follow.’ (SG)
‘He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.’ (SG)
‘I must admit you’re not the chosen one I would have chosen,’ he said. (SG)
…the worst thing about Vorbis isn’t that he’s evil, but that he makes good people do evil. (SG)
Simony snorted. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we live and learn, just like you said.’
‘Some of us even do it the other way around,’ said Didactylos. (SG)
Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them. (SG)
The Captain frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?’
‘A bit of a poser, that,’ agreed the mate. ‘I s’pose it makes up for ‘em ... enjoying themselves all the time when they’re alive, too?’ He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious. (SG)
Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief… (SG)
‘Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.’ (SG)
‘Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place…’ (SG)
‘I still don’t see how one god can be a hundred thunder gods. They all look different...’
‘False noses.’
‘What?’
‘And different voices. I happen to know Io’s got seventy different hammers. Not common knowledge, that. And It’s just the same with mother goddesses. There’s only one of ‘em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it’s amazing what you can do with a padded bra.’ (SG)
And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god). (SG)
… he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish. (SG)
… on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion. (SG)
‘Any mushrooms in these parts?’ said Brutha innocently.
St. Ungulant nodded happily.
‘After the annual rains, yes. Red ones with yellow spots. The desert becomes really interesting after the mushroom season.’
‘Full of giant purple singing slugs? Talking pillars of flame? Exploding giraffes? That sort of thing?’ said Brutha carefully.
‘Good heavens, yes,’ said the saint. ‘I don’t know why. I think they’re attracted by the mushrooms.’ (SG)
He was, of course, mad. He’d occasionally suspected this. But he took the view that madness should not be wasted. (SG)
There was a chorus of nervous laughs, such as there always is from people who owe their jobs and possibly their lives to the whim of the person who has just cracked the not very amusing line. (SG)
Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings. (SG)
It didn’t matter if you fooled yourself provided you didn’t let yourself know it, and did it well. (SG)
Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be. (SG)
Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection. (SG)
There’s a streak of madness in everyone who spends quality time with gods … (SG)
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It’s unreliable levers that are the problem. (SG)
‘We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies.’ He waved a hand towards the god. ‘Now we’ve got a truth to die for!’
‘No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.’ (SG)
‘You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.’ (SG)
Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG. (SG)
‘Are you a philosopher? Where’s your sponge?’ (SG)
‘I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.’ (SG)
‘We get the gods we deserve,’ said Brutha, ‘and I think we don’t deserve any.’ (SG)
‘Everything happens because things have happened before. Stupid.’ (SG)
‘…the way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.’ (SG)
‘I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts,’ said Brutha. ‘That way, everyone’s happy.’ (SG)
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly. (SG)
Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. (SG)
One of the recurring philosophical questions is:
‘Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?’
Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in the forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. (SG)
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you. (SG)
Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history … ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just … well, things happening one after another. (SG)
There are fewer metaphors around than people think. (SG)
Many stories start long before they begin … (SG)
…what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods. (SG)
The trouble with being a god is that you’ve got no one to pray to. (SG)
…there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do. (SG)
The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done. (SG)
It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air. (SG)
‘I said, that’s blasphemy!’
‘Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I’m a god!’ (SG)
Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time. (SG)
Brother Preptil, the master of music, had described Brutha’s voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. (SG)
… when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise. (SG)
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. (SG)
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. (SG)
Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, ‘It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting …’ (SG)
It was very hard to tell what Vorbis was thinking, often even after he had told you. (SG)
Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourishes underground. (SG)
Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think. (SG)
‘Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o’course.’ (SG)
Vorbis liked to see properly guilty consciences. That was what consciences were for. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned. (SG)
This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them. (SG)
Hanging around is another thing tortoises are very good at. They’re practically world champions. (SG)
There were twenty-three other novices in Brutha’s dormitory, on the principle that sleeping alone promoted sin. This always puzzled the novices themselves, since a moment’s reflection would suggest that there were whole ranges of sins only available in company. (SG)
You couldn’t put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place where the inevitable just went and waited. (SG)
When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror. (SG)
‘Yes, but humans are more important than animals,’ said Brutha.
‘This is a point of view often expressed by humans,’ said Om. (SG)
If people don’t respect then they won’t fear; and if they don’t fear, how can you get them to believe? (SG)
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. (SG)
They were sheep, possibly the most stupid animal in the universe with the possible exception of the duck. (SG)
Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. (SG)
Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him. (SG)
‘Winners never talk about glorious victories. That’s because they’re the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It’s only the losers who have glorious victories.’ (SG)
‘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. (SG)
‘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…’ (SG)
People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time. (SG)
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We’re philosophers. We think, therefore we am.’ (SG)
The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.*
*Provided that he wasn’t poor, foreign nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous or a woman. (SG)
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.’ (SG)
Didactylos’s thoughts chased after one another with a whooshing noise. No wonder he was bald. Hair would have burned off from the inside. (SG)
‘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.’ (SG)
‘Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.’ (SG)
‘When you’ve got ‘em by the curiosity, their hearts and minds will follow.’ (SG)
‘He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.’ (SG)
‘I must admit you’re not the chosen one I would have chosen,’ he said. (SG)
…the worst thing about Vorbis isn’t that he’s evil, but that he makes good people do evil. (SG)
Simony snorted. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we live and learn, just like you said.’
‘Some of us even do it the other way around,’ said Didactylos. (SG)
Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them. (SG)
The Captain frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?’
‘A bit of a poser, that,’ agreed the mate. ‘I s’pose it makes up for ‘em ... enjoying themselves all the time when they’re alive, too?’ He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious. (SG)
Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief… (SG)
‘Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.’ (SG)
‘Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place…’ (SG)
‘I still don’t see how one god can be a hundred thunder gods. They all look different...’
‘False noses.’
‘What?’
‘And different voices. I happen to know Io’s got seventy different hammers. Not common knowledge, that. And It’s just the same with mother goddesses. There’s only one of ‘em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it’s amazing what you can do with a padded bra.’ (SG)
And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god). (SG)
… he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish. (SG)
… on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion. (SG)
‘Any mushrooms in these parts?’ said Brutha innocently.
St. Ungulant nodded happily.
‘After the annual rains, yes. Red ones with yellow spots. The desert becomes really interesting after the mushroom season.’
‘Full of giant purple singing slugs? Talking pillars of flame? Exploding giraffes? That sort of thing?’ said Brutha carefully.
‘Good heavens, yes,’ said the saint. ‘I don’t know why. I think they’re attracted by the mushrooms.’ (SG)
He was, of course, mad. He’d occasionally suspected this. But he took the view that madness should not be wasted. (SG)
There was a chorus of nervous laughs, such as there always is from people who owe their jobs and possibly their lives to the whim of the person who has just cracked the not very amusing line. (SG)
Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings. (SG)
It didn’t matter if you fooled yourself provided you didn’t let yourself know it, and did it well. (SG)
Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be. (SG)
Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection. (SG)
There’s a streak of madness in everyone who spends quality time with gods … (SG)
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It’s unreliable levers that are the problem. (SG)
‘We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies.’ He waved a hand towards the god. ‘Now we’ve got a truth to die for!’
‘No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.’ (SG)
‘You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.’ (SG)
Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG. (SG)
‘Are you a philosopher? Where’s your sponge?’ (SG)
‘I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.’ (SG)
‘We get the gods we deserve,’ said Brutha, ‘and I think we don’t deserve any.’ (SG)
‘Everything happens because things have happened before. Stupid.’ (SG)
‘…the way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.’ (SG)
‘I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts,’ said Brutha. ‘That way, everyone’s happy.’ (SG)
