Quotes from Men at Arms: The Play

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

“Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

“We're dealing here," said Vimes, "With a twisted mind."
"Oh, no! You think so?"
"Yes."
"But... no... you can't be right. Because Nobby was with us all the time."
"Not Nobby," said Vimes testily. "Whatever he might do to a dragon, I doubt if he'd make it explode. There's stranger people in this world than Corporal Nobbs, my lad."
Carrot's expression slid into a rictus of intrigued horror.
"Gosh," he said.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

“Silverfish looked down.
"Oh. Are you a dwarf?"
Cuddy gave him a blank stare.
"Are you a giant?" He said.
"Me? Of course not!"
"Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

“It was the way he wore the place. You expected him any moment to break into the kind of song that has suspicious rhymes and phrases like "my kind of town" and "I wanna be a part of it" in it; the kind of song where people dance in the street and give the singer apples and join in and a dozen lowly matchgirls suddenly show amazing choreographical ability and everyone acts like cheery lovable citizens instead of the murderous, evil-minded, self-centered people they suspect themselves to be. But the point was that if Carrot had erupted into a song, people WOULD have joined in. Carrot could have jollied up a circle of standing stones to form up behind him and do a rumba.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

“Right!"
"Right!"
"You can get there!"
"I can get there!"
"You're a natural at counting to two!"
"I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!"
"If you can count to two, you can count to anything!"
"If I can count to two, I can count to anything!"
"And then the world is your mollusc!"
"My mollusc! What's a mollusc?”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms: The Play

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Popular quotes

“We don’t serve God to gain His acceptance; we are accepted, so we serve God. We don’t follow Him to be loved; we are loved, so we follow Him. It is not what we do that determines who we are; it is who we are that determines what we do.”
― Neil T. Anderson, quote from Victory Over the Darkness

“Children killing children. That's a terrible thing."
"What do you think has gone wrong?"
"It's not just the children. It's the grown-ups too. Some people are growing children, not raising children, and there's a big difference."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, people grow hogs. You give them a place to live, give them all the food they need to keep growing, and make sure that they don't get sick on you. With children you got to raise them. Of course, you feed and clothe them. But a parent has to take the time to teach them right and wrong. A parent has to discipline them. And a parent got to be there to listen to them, help them with their problems. I think most people do their best, but there are some parents these days that are growing children, not raising children.
"It's a sad thing. These children have everything they need to grow up, but they are missing something inside. They must hurt awful bad and no one has shown them the way to live. Buying them their food or even fancy clothes or a car ain't going to help if a child is hurting inside. We all need the same things.”
― quote from Life is So Good

“A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”.

What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists!

Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it!
Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning?

Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.”
― quote from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism

“When a massive failure to preserve the integrity of an ecosystem occured, no one escaped the consequences.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Gypsy Morph

“A lady of resources makes her own luck.”
― Shelley Adina, quote from Lady of Devices

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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