Find that Pratchett quotation

October 21, 2013 11:02 AM

Does anyone know the Terry Pratchett quotation I'm trying to remember? I think (but am not certain) it's in one of the City Watch books, possibly Night Watch. It was a great concise expression of how people are not good or bad, they're people, and how most people want tomorrow to be the same as yesterday with maybe a tiny bit of improvement to look forward to. Or at least that's how I remember it. I can't for the life of me nail down the details of the quote and Pratchett is so popular and prolific that trying to Google it is not working. Hivemind, help me!
posted by Wretch729 to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

Best answer: I found this quote here, which the site says is from Feet of Clay:

'They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.'

I just googled Vetinari quotes, because it sounded to me exactly like a thing his Lordship would (and did!) say.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 11:10 AM on October 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Previously.
posted by zamboni at 11:11 AM on October 21, 2013

Best answer: Is this going to be a monthly thing now? Because I'm totally cool with it, if it is.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:11 AM on October 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: -1 point to me for not finding that AskMe when I did my search but while that quotation from Feet of Clay is on the right topic it isn't the one I was thinking of. Looks like I was conflating it with another passage because seeing it finally made me remember enough of the other quote I was thinking of to be able to find it (it was in Night Watch). Thank you everyone!

“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.
People on the side of The People always ended up dissapointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”

posted by Wretch729 at 11:32 AM on October 21, 2013 [6 favorites]

Best answer: There's a similar quote in Good Omens:

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
posted by McCoy Pauley at 7:19 PM on October 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Adding this because it was the quote I thought of from your question, and does not appear to be on the main Pratchett quote sites:

Sybil Vimes, in The Fifth Elephant: "And Serafine spoke of trolls as if they were things. Sybil hadn't met many trolls, but the ones she knew seemed to spend their lives raising their children and looking for the next dollar just like everyone else."
posted by viggorlijah at 10:39 PM on October 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Oh, nice catch on the Good Omens quote.

The "evil is treating people as things" theme runs through many if not most of the Discworld books. The same line is in both I Shall Wear Midnight and Carpe Jugulum.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:13 AM on October 22, 2013 [1 favorite]