[b]Terry Pratchett
The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, What about me? and you can just hear the universe replying, Well, what about you?[/b]
Either that or it just snickers.
Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
For example, how to do it.
Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.
The banality of it, as it were.
I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.
That or some ideal.
Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.
If not lots and lots of times.
There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called ‘the people’. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.
We should all be so lucky.