… the good guy was the good guy because he didn’t want anyone to see him being bad. He did not want to be ashamed. He did not want to be the darkness. (Sn)
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‘… some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.’ (Sn)
'And though nobody's saying it, we're locked in here for our protection. You see, everyone else is locked out, and although they sometimes act dumb, policemen can't help being clever. They know that people need witches, they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right.' (ISWM)
Roland has succeeded in banishing the dreadful aunts, the Baron's sisters who, frankly, even the old Baron thought were as nasty a pair of old ferrets as any man should find down the trousers of his life. (ISWM)
'I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal.' (ISWM)
'… we are part of the scheme of things. Light and dark. Night and day. Sweet and sour. Good and evil (within acceptable college statutes). It just helps if we can have sensible and reliable people on both side …' (UA)
'And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.' (UA)
'… I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.' (UA)
The man had an uncanny ability to look inside your head, and leave it feeling grubby. (N)
'... a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper.' (ER)
'There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.' (CJ) She’d always tried to face towards the light. But the harder you stared into the brightness the harsher it burned into you until at last, the temptation picked you up and bid you turn around to see how long, rich, strong and dark, streaming away behind you your shadow had become - (CJ)
Now this he understood. He was never at ease with politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as ‘bad’.
It was all too complicated and, where it was complicated, it meant that someone was trying to fool you. But on the street, in hot pursuit, it was all so clear. Someone was going to be still standing at the end of the chase, and all you had to concentrate on was making sure it was you. (FE) It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear
- they just stored up your muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you. (MA) Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good
watchman, Carrot always said. To light a candle in the dark. (FC) '…I am not so blind that I can’t see darkness.' (AM)
... Granny Weatherwax doing Good is arguably more to be feared than any other witch doing Bad ... (PP)
She gave a depreciating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Aliss of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed vampyre whose morals were worse than his spelling, no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what’s best. (Ma)
She was a good witch. That was her role in life. That was the burden she had to bear. Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong. (Ma)
Granny looked at the rising sun poking through the mists.
'Good and bad is tricky,’ she said. ‘I ain’t too certain about where people stand. P’rhaps what matters is which way you face.' (WA) 'Bein' human means judgin’all the time,’ said the voice behind him. ‘This and that, good and bad, making choices every day… that’s human.’
‘And are you sure you make the right decisions?’ ‘No. But I do the best I can.’ ‘And hope for mercy, eh?’ A bony finger prodded him in the back. ‘Mercy’s a fine thing, but judgin’ comes first. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re bein’merciful about.' (CJ) 'The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.' (WA)
... he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and they devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. (GO) Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. (GO)
'Some of us think that darkness isn’t a depth, it’s a state of mind.' (Th)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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