'Make them think. Tell them what's got to be done, and let them work out how.' (N)
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People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then. (N)
... history was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started to follow bad orders. (J)
… she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person and it overflowed in every direction. (JB)
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)
… senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners. (S)
Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herrod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled ‘Me, who does the telling’ and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled ‘Everyone else.’
Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly. (LC) 'You're going to need a powerful lot of nomes to do all this. And they're going to need training.'
'But, but all that they'd have to do is pull and push when they're told, won't they?' Dorcas hummed under his breath again. Masklin got the impression that he always did that if he was going to break some bad news. 'Well laddie,' he said. 'I'm six, I've seen a lot of people and I've got to tell you, if you lined up ten nomes and shouted "Pull", four of them would push and two of them would say "Pardon?" That's how people are.' (Truck) 'The world is changing and it needs its shepherds and sometimes its butchers.' (RS)
So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to delegate! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn’t received and might have been eaten by the gargoyles. (Sn)
It was true that every organization had to have its backbone, and therefore it stood to reason that there also would have to be some person who equated to the bits usually destined for dog food. (Sn)
He was a scallywag, a chancer, a ruthless fighter and a dangerous driver of bargains over the speed limit. Since it was a bit of a mouthful, he was referred to as a successful businessman, since that more or less amounted to the same thing. (Sn)
'Well, for the proper working of the world, said Lady Margolotta, 'it is essential that ring binders are important to at least one person.' (UA)
'I've got a huge workload!'
'Delegate!' 'You know I'm hopeless at delegating, sir!' 'Then delegate the job of delegating to someone who isn't!' (UA) … authority must back up authority, in public at least, otherwise there is no authority, and therefore the senior authority is forced to back up the junior authority, even if he, the senior authority, believes the junior authority is a tiresome little tit. (UA)
'Now, I am concluding this meeting, although what it has in fact concluded I shall decide later.' (UA)
The Office of Master of The Traditions had fallen inevitably on Ponder Stibbons, who tended to get all the jobs that required someone who thought that things should happen on time and that numbers should add up. (UA)
'I administer, Dean,' said Ridcully, calmly.
'Then we must be doing something, otherwise you'd have nothing to administrate.' 'That comment strikes at the very heart of the bureaucratic principle, Dean, and I shall ignore it.' (CCODD) 'It’s not lying when you do it to officers!' (MR)
The ability to ask questions like ‘Where am I and who is the “I” that is asking?’ is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.*
*Although of course it’s not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations. (LC) One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it. (GG)
'Want to stay on here? I had a word with your Dean. He gave you a bloody good reference.’
‘Did he? What did he say?’ ‘He said if I could get you to do any work for me I’d be lucky’, said Bill. (LC) For something to exist, it has to be observed.
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is paperwork. (TOT) 'I don’t know how to do officering.’
‘No one knows how to do officering, Fred. That’s why they’re officers. If they knew anything, they’d be sergeants.' (FE) Plan A hadn't worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had
only ever planned as far as B. (GO) |
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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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