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March 23 - March 24, 2024
“And the blackjack? You, who have never struck another man? You clamber on rooftops and pick the locks on your own desks. You’re like a caged animal, dreaming of the jungle! I’d like to give you what you long for. I’d like to throw you to the lions.”
Why temples? thought Moist, as he looked up at the facade of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. Why do they always build banks to look like temples, despite the fact that several major religions (a) are canonically against what they do inside and (b) bank there?
take care, when you are closely observing, that you are not closely observed.
Whoever said you can’t fool an honest man wasn’t one.
They were indeed what was known as “old money,” which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant.
Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
Oh, all right, if you were going for the fine detail, there were, in fact, enough skeletons in his closet to fill a big crypt, with enough left over to equip a fun-fair house of horrors and maybe also make a macabre but mildly amusing ashtray.
“I didn’t sign up to deal with something like this!” “No, Mr. Lipwig, you signed up to die,” snapped Vetinari, his voice suddenly as cold and deadly as a falling icicle. “You signed up to be justly hanged by the neck until dead for crimes against the city, against the public good, against the trust of man for man. And you were resurrected, because the city required you to be. This is about the city, Mr. Lipwig. It is always about the city. You know, of course, that I have plans?”
“If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag of potatoes or a bag of gold?” “Yes, but a desert island isn’t Ankh-Morpork!” “And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right? It’s just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. Add a knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you’ve got a meal, anywhere. Bury gold in the ground and you’ll be worrying about thieves forever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand percent.”
On a desert island gold is worthless. Food gets you through times of no gold much better than gold gets you through times of no food. If it comes to that, gold is worthless in a gold mine, too. The medium of exchange in a gold mine is the pickax.
It’s in the city itself. The city says: In exchange for that gold, you will have all these things. The city is the magician, the alchemist in reverse. It turns worthless gold into . . . everything. How much is Ankh-Morpork worth? Add it all up! The buildings, the streets, the people, the skills, the art in the galleries, the guilds, the laws, the libraries . . . billions? No. No money would be enough.
It was a dream, but Moist was good at selling dreams. And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up.
Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms, in the dark and based on bullshit.
Tell someone you were going to rob them and all that happened was that you got a reputation as a truthful man.
I wonder . . . am I really a bastard or am I just really good at thinking like one?
“Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr. Lipwig?” “Because people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”
If you fall, let them remember how you turned it into a dive. Sometimes the finest hour is the last one.

