This is known as Finance. (GP)
They'd saved the city with gold more easily, at that point, than any hero could have managed with steel. But in truth it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there for ever provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look.
This is known as Finance. (GP)
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There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent. (TT)
... Dibbler was an extremely good hot sausage salesman. He had to be, given the nature of his sausages. (TT)
He was, by and large, against the idea of a permanent office. On the positive side it made him easier to find, but on the negative side it made him easier to find. The success of Dibbler’s commercial strategy hinged on him being able to find customers, not the other way around. (SM)
Ankh-Morpork has always had a fine tradition of welcoming people of all races, colours and shapes, if they have money to spend and a return ticket. (RM)
C.M.O.T. Dibbler liked to describe himself as a merchant adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as an itinerant pedlar whose money-making schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such as trying to sell things he didn’t own or which didn’t work or, sometimes, didn’t even exist. (RM)
'Ah, ‘tis a hard trade, horse-holding,’ said the man. ‘It’s learning the proper grovellin’ and the irreverent-but-not-too-impudent cheery ‘oss-’older’s banter. People don’t just want you to look after the ‘oss, see. They want a ‘oss-’olding hexperience.’
‘They do?’ ‘They want an amusin’ encounter and a soup-son of repartee,’ said the little man. ‘It’s not just a matter of ‘oldin’ reins.’ Realization began to dawn on Victor. 'It’s a performance,’ he said. (MP) ... Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am
now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end. Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell. (MP) 'You’re a criminal?’ said Teppic.
‘Well, criminal’s a dirty word, know what I mean?’said the little ancestor. ‘I’d prefer entrepreneur.' (P) The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Milk,’ said the child, still focusing furiously. ‘You get it out of goats. You know?’ Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. (ER) But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money– sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything – but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn’t sleep. (IT)
'The army’s a piece of piss compared to running a pig farm and looking after three lazy brothers.' (MR)
Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff. (MP) ... everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning – with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic – that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to put out. (TT)
Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore –according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind – it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing. (MA)
Chrysoprase had been a very quick learner when he arrived in Ankh-Morpork. He began with an important lesson: hitting people was thuggery. Paying other people to do the hitting on your behalf was good business. (SM)
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn’t own their own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. (E)
Distillation of alcohol was illegal in Lancre. On the other hand, King Verence had long ago given up any idea of stopping a witch doing something she wanted to do, so merely required Nanny Ogg to keep her still somewhere it wasn’t obvious. She thoroughly approved of the prohibition, since this gave her an unchallenged market for her own product, known wherever men fell backwards into a ditch as ‘suicider'. (Ma)
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