A Practical Guide to Conquering the World

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.

Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

but anyone who tells you it’s impossible to be madly in love with two people at the same time clearly doesn’t go to the theatre.

Moral: don’t play with savage things that are stronger than you are.

Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.

There’s a story about a young palace clerk who’d had word that his childhood sweetheart back in his home village was being courted by the local tanner. He couldn’t afford the bribe for a warrant of absence, so he forged despatches from military intelligence, which misled the joint chiefs of the defence staff into thinking the Hasrut were planning to invade. The joint chiefs went to the emperor and persuaded him to levy the biggest conscript army the empire had ever seen, in order to deal with the Hasrut once and for all. The young clerk wangled a posting as a deputy assistant quartermaster with the expeditionary force, which he accompanied just as far as the turning off the Great Military Road that led to his village, two miles away. The army, meanwhile, continued into Hasrut territory, was ambushed at the Two Horns and wiped out to the last man, leading in turn to the fall of the Nineteenth Dynasty and thirty years of civil war. Moral: even the humblest of us can make a difference, and it’s love that makes the world go round, or at least wobble horribly.

Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.

I drew a long breath so I could point out to her all the fallacies in her argument, but then I thought; why? Out of an overwhelming duty to the truth? Fuck, as I may have observed before, the truth. If it was here, would it go out of its way to defend me? Unlikely. The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor. Besides, what is the truth, anyway? In a court of law, it’s the testimony of credible witnesses corroborating each other. She’d been a witness and she knew what she saw. So was I, but even my mother wouldn’t say I was credible. And there’d been hundreds of people there, all rock-solid upright pillars of Dejauzi society. And when I stabbed myself, there were loads of people watching, and they saw what happened with their own eyes. And, come to that, Alyattes was now the nephew of the old emperor and the rightful heir to the throne. He hadn’t been until quite recently, but pretty soon anyone who could testify against his claim would be dead or singing a very different tune, and what was once a lie would become the truth, official, carved on the lintels of triumphal arches; and if you can’t believe what you read on a government arch, what can you believe? All the books would tell it that way, and in a thousand years’ time it will be the truth, just as what was once the bottom of the sea is now a mountaintop. Ask the wise men at the university what truth is and they’ll tell you it’s the consensus of informed and qualified scholars, based on the best evidence available. Availability is governed by what gets burned in the meanwhile, but I see no real problem with that. All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?

My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I'm not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn't carry on the way it's been so far.

There’s a saying in our family,” he said, “the self-taught man has a fool for a tutor.

Comedy to observers, tragedy to participants; I consider myself an observer. I fly over my life like a migrating bird, and I only ever play for beans or counters, never for real money.

The Cataboeans are all right. They believe some truly weird stuff. They believe that they’re the only people on earth, and all the other anthropoid entities they meet are the spirits of the dead.

The truth, I’ve found, is like an annoying little dog that takes a fancy to you in the street and follows you home, barking. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been glad to be confronted with the truth.

The truth’s the truth, that’s it’s defining quality. Either a thing’s true or it isn’t. But tell me this. If I don’t believe in a thing and everybody else in whole wide world does, what then?” He smiled. “A thing is true because we believe it. If we stop believing, it stops being true.

idea that you can make life bearable merely by living it in a different place has always struck me as bizarre. I base this view on experience. Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve always still been me, and some obstacles are too much even for geography to overcome

Seventy years ago they made a bit of a stir at the Echmen court when a political dissident sought refuge with them and the Echmen demanded his extradition. What they got was the dissident’s head, perfectly preserved in a jar of wild honey. I happen to like honey, but not as much as that.