‘Why me?’
Why not? (OYCSM)
Why not? (OYCSM)
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If you thought hard enough, he'd always considered, you could work out everything. The wind, for example. It had always puzzled him until the day he'd realized that it was caused by all the trees waving about. (Truck)
Sometimes you had to turn facts in several directions until you found the right way to fit them in Ridcully's head. (LC)
Ponder was a great believer in logic, in the face of all local evidence ... (H)
It was such a relief to be right, even though you knew you'd only got there by trying every possible way to be wrong. (FC)
A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick. (Ma)
It was possible, if you kept on talking at the Archchancellor long enough, that some facts might squeeze through. (IT)
The Quirm College for Young Ladies encouraged self-reliance and logical thought. Her parents had sent her there for that reason.
They'd assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defence so that no-one would ever attack them. (SM) ‘You can’t cross the same river twice, Archchancellor,’ he said.
Ridcully stared at him. ‘Why not? This is a bridge.’ (LL) ‘It’s like people care more about their pride than about what’s correct, about the truth. What kind of sense does that make?’ (LM)
‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege. (ER)
… there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner. (LF)
I can’t be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I’d be mad, and I’m not made, so trees can’t talk. (LF)
Magnus was an easy-going dwarf and did the wrong thing, which was to be logical. (RS)
‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’
‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’ (LE) It was often a good idea, Vimes had always found, to give the silly bits of the brain something to do, so they did not interfere with the important ones which had a proper job to fulfil. (Sn)
'And you are telling me I'm wrong. Are you?'
'I would rather you thought of me as suggesting a way in which you could be even more right.' (UA) Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an angry Archchancellor, were to use the proper academic term, unhelpful. And he neglected to think strategically, always a mistake when talking to fellow academics, and as a result made the mistake of employing, as at this point, common sense. (UA)
... she believed in encouraging logical thought and a healthy enquiring mind among the nascent young women in her care, a course of action which is, as far as wisdom is concerned, on a par with going alligator-hunting in a cardboard boat during the sinking season. (SM)
'That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way ...' (MM)
People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense. (W)
'I like that explanation,’ said Ridcully. ‘It is elegant, Mister Stibbons.’
‘It’s only a guess, sir.’ ‘Good enough for physics,’ said Ridcully. (SODW) 'That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?' (H)
The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did
not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher*, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large. *He always argued that he was. (S) MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF. (H)
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