you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)
After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if
you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)
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Ridcully assumed that anything people had time to write down couldn’t be important. (IT)
'Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their
life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.* *A policy adopted by almost all managers and several notable gods. (IT) Lord Vetinari was sitting in the palace gardens watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance. He found something very slightly offensive about the way they just fluttered around enjoying themselves in an unprofitable way. (IT)
The Patrician was a pragmatist. He’d never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn’t work, however, got broken. (SM)
And Mustrum Ridcully, the current Archchancellor, liked to wander around the sleepy buildings, nodding to the servants and leaving little notes for his subordinates, usually designed for no other purpose than to make it absolutely clear that he was up and attending to the business of the day while they were still fast asleep. (LL)
'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)
It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air. (SG)
The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done. (SG)
Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people. (MP)
There were some things on which even they were united. No more policy statements, no more consultative documents, no more morale-boosting messages to all staff. This was Hell, but you had to draw the line somewhere. (E)
'But you don’t have to go! I need you!’
‘You’ve got advisers,’ said Teppic mildly. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she snapped. ‘Anyway, there’s only Koomi, and he’s no good.’ ‘You’re lucky. I had Dios, and he was good. Koomi will be much better, you can learn a lot by not listening to what he has to say. You can go a long way with incompetent advisers.' (P) Besides, there was something disquieting about young Trymon. He didn’t smoke, only drank boiled water, and Galder had a nasty suspicion that he was clever. He didn’t smile often enough, and he liked figures and the sort of organisation charts that show lots of squares with arrows pointing to other squares. In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word ‘personnel’ and mean it. (LF)
'Necromancy is a Fine Art?’ said Moist.
‘None finer, young man. Get things just a tiny bit wrong and the spirits of the vengeful dead may enter your head via your ears and blow your brains out down your nose.' (MM) Hexperiment: to use magic just to see what happens. (W)
... being turned in to something small and sticky often offends. (W)
It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head you couldn’t make them work at all. (W)
'... that’s why I don’t like magic, captain. ’Cos it’s magic. You can’t ask questions, it’s magic. It doesn’t explain
anything, it’s magic. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s magic! That’s what I don’t like about magic, it does everything by magic!' (Th) 'Magic is basically just movin’ stuff around,’ said Ridcully. (DW)
What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird drawings in old books and in the wrong hands it was dangerous as hell, but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands. (GP)
And then thlabber happened. It was a traditional magic term, although Moist didn’t know this. There was a moment in which everything, even things that couldn’t be stretched, felt stretched. And then there was the moment when everything suddenly went back to not being stretched, known as the moment of thlabber. (GP)
Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again. (GP)
'Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them.' (HFS)
And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done. (WFM)
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (NW)
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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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