Cohen sneered the sneer of a man who has never been truly imprisoned even when he’s been locked up.
Cohen talks to Rincewind
Cohen sneered the sneer of a man who has never been truly imprisoned even when he’s been locked up.
Cohen talks to Rincewind
In the fetid sack Rincewind grimaced. He was already beginning to take a dislike to the first speaker, as one naturally does with people urging that you be put to death without delay. But when that sort of person started talking about things being more important than people, you knew you were in big trouble.
The People’s Army captures Rincewind
‘What do you call the things that grind corn?’
‘Peasants.’
‘Yes, but what do they grind corn with?’
‘I don’t know. Why should I know? Only peasants need to know that.’
‘Yes, I suppose that says it all, really,’ said Mr. Saveloy sadly.
Mr. Saveloy and Six Beneficent Winds
‘Barbarism? Hah! When we kills people we do it there and then, lookin’ ’em in the eye, and we’d be happy to buy ’em a drink in the next world, no harm done. I never knew a barbarian who cut up people slowly in little rooms, or tortured women to make ’em look pretty, or put poison in people’s grub. Civilization? If that’s civilization, you can shove it where the sun don’t shine!’
Cohen the Barbarian
“I thought we could do it without anyone getting hurt. By using our brains.”
“Can’t. History don’t work like that. Blood first, then brains.”
“Mountains of skulls,” said Truckle.
“There’s got to be a better way than fighting,” said Mr. Saveloy.
“Yep. Lots of ’em. Only none of ’em work.”
The Silver Horde takes the city
Fate sat back.
The gods relaxed.
“A draw,” he announced. “Oh, yes. You have appeared to win in Hunghung but you have had to lose your most valuable piece, is that not so?”
�
“I never sacrifice a pawn,” said the Lady.
“How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?”
“Oh, I never play to win.” She smiled. “But I do play not to lose�”
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
He [Rincewind] wanted to say: how can you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity.
Rincewind and the People’s Army
It was completely fair. The ‘get them drunk and butcher the lot of them’ stratagem was the oldest trick in the book, or would have been if barbarians bothered with books. Anyone falling for it would be doing the world a favour by being slaughtered over the pudding. But at least you could trust the food. Barbarians didn’t poison food. You never knew when you might be short of a mouthful yourself.
Lord Hong tries to poison the Silver Horde
He grinned to himself. The whole of his life, so far, had been complicated. There had been timetables and lists and a whole basket of things he must do and things he shouldn’t do, and the life of Mr. Saveloy had been this little wriggly thing trying to survive in the middle of it all. But now it had suddenly all become very simple. You held one end and you poked the other into people. A man could live his whole life by a maxim like that. And, afterwards, get a very interesting afterlife–
Mr. Saveloy joins the Silver Horde as they head to battle
The statue looked like porcelain. It had been painted quite realistically. One Sun Mirror seemed an ordinary sort of man. You would not have pointed him out in a crowd as Emperor material. But this man, with his little round hat and little round shield and little round men on little round ponies, had glued together a thousand warring factions into one great Empire, often using their own blood to do it.
Rincewind looked closer. Of course, it was just an impression, but around the set of the mouth and the look of the eyes there was an expression he’d last seen on the face of Ghenghiz Cohen.
It was the expression of someone who was absolutely and totally unafraid of anything.
Rincewind finds the emperor’s tomb
..-
the tea cerimony had been going for three hours now, but you can’t rush a good cuppa
who cares
inexperienced travelers might think that ‘Aargh!’ is universal,but in Betrobi it means ‘highly enjoyable’ and in Howondaland it means, variously, ‘i would like to eat your foot’, ‘tour wife is a big hippo’ and ‘hello thinks Mr purple cat.’ One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting ‘Quick! Extra boiling oil!”