Taken from: http://www.chrisjoneswriting.com/vetinari.html

‘I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, lord.’

‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander’. (COM)

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote. (M)

Just by looking at him you could tell he was the sort of man you’d expect to keep a white cat, and caress it idly while sentencing people to death in a piranha tank; and you’d hazard for good measure that he probably collected rare thin porcelain, turning it over and over in his blue-white fingers while distant screams echoed from the depths of the dungeons. You wouldn’t put it past him to use the word ‘exquisite’ and have thin lips. He looked the kind of person

who, when they blink, you mark it off on the calendar.

Practically none of this was in fact the case ... (S)

'And is he a fair and just ruler?’

Carding thought about it. The Patrician’s spy network was said to be superb. ‘I would say,’ he said carefully, ‘that he is unfair and unjust, but scrupulously even-handed. He is unfair and unjust to everyone, without fear or favour’. (S)

He appeared to have no vice that anyone could discover. You’d have thought, with that pale, equine face, that he’d incline towards stuff with whips, needles, and young women in dungeons. The other lords could have accepted that. Nothing wrong with whips and needles, in moderation. But the Patrician apparently spent his evenings studying reports and, on special occasions, if he could stand the excitement, playing chess. (GG)

The thief shuffled out. It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly. You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away. You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away. (GG)

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it. (GG)

Human nature, the Patrician always said, was a marvellous thing. Once you understood where its levers were. (GG)

The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.*

*While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course. (GG)

...when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible. (GG)

'I shall deal with the matter momentarily,’ he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask. (GG)

The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine. (GG)

'Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn’t in the job.' (GG)

'Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself,’ said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. ‘The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.' (GG)

Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people. The fresh rain glistened on the panorama of towers and rooftops, all unaware of the teeming, rancorous world it was dropping into. Luckier rain fell on upland sheep, or whispered gently over forests, or pattered somewhat incestuously into the sea. Rain that fell on Ankh-Morpork, though, was rain that was in trouble. They did terrible things to water, in Ankh-Morpork. Being drunk was only the start of its problems. (GG)

'I believe you find life such a problem because you think that there are the good people and the bad people,’ said the man. ‘You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.' (GG)

'... the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was over-thrown no-one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world.' (GG)

'Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. 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. (GG)

He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him. (MP)

In this he was echoing the Patrician’s view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment.

If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done. (MA)

He was extremely good at listening. He created a kind of mental suction. People told him things just to avoid the silence. (SM)

... the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skin, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. (SM)

The Patrician was a pragmatist. He’d never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn’t work, however, got broken. (SM)

Lord Vetinari was sitting in the palace gardens watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance. He found something very slightly offensive about the way they just fluttered around enjoying themselves in an unprofitable way. (IT)

'You have the mind of a true policeman, Vimes.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Really? Was it a compliment?' (FC)

... he listened with great care because what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That's where the things were that they hoped he didn't know and didn't want him to find out. (J)

'Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.' (J)

... the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them. (J)

And if the Patrician was anything, he was the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy. (J)

After all, you couldn’t plan for every eventuality, because that would involve knowing what was going to happen, and if you knew what was going to happen, you could probably see to it that it didn’t, or at least happened to someone else. So the Patrician never planned. Plans often got in the way. (J)

'Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.' (J)

'Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.' (J)

'People get mistaken about old Fred, sir. He’s a man with a solid bottom to his character.’

‘He’s got a solid bottom to his bottom, ca- Mister Ironfoundersson.’

‘I mean he doesn’t flap in an emergency, sir.’

‘He doesn’t do anything in an emergency,’ said the Patrician. ‘Except possibly hide.' (FE)

'Tell me, Leonard,’he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?’

Leonard picked up his cup of coffee. ‘Oh dear. Won’t that be rather messy?’ he said. (FE)

Lord Vetinari paused. He found it difficult to talk to Frederick Colon. He dealt on a daily basis with people who treated conversation as a complex game, and with Colon he had to keep on adjusting his mind in case he overshot. (FE)

... you found that what you really wanted was power and there were much politer ways of getting it. And then you realized that power was a bauble. Any thug had power. The true prize was control. Lord Vetinari knew that. When heavy weights were balanced on the scales, the trick was to know where to place your thumb.

And all control started with the self. (FE)

'The world turns, your reverence, and we must spin with it.' (TT)

'It’ll end in trouble, my lord,’ said Ridcully. He’d found it a good general comment in practically any debate. Besides, it was so often true.

Lord Vetinari sighed. ‘In my experience, practically everything does,’ he said. ‘That is the nature of things. All we can do is sing as we go.' (TT)

'I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas,’ said Lord Vetinari. (TT)

‘And these are your reasons, my Lord?’

‘Do you think I have others?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.’

Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all. (TT)

'I'm sure no one could call me a despot, your reverence,’ said Lord Vetinari severely.

Hughnon Ridcully made a misjudged attempted to lighten the mood. ‘Not twice at any rate, ahahah.' (TT)

'People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.' (TT)

'So ... we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in?'

'Except the public, sir,' said William, trying to keep up.

'Which isn't the same as people and humans.'

'I think it's more complicated than that, sir.' (TT)

'Things that are back to front are often easier to comprehend if they are upside down as well, said Lord Vetinari, tapping his chin with the silver knob of his can in an absent-minded way. 'In life as in politics.' (TT)

'In return, however,’ said the Patrician, ‘I must ask you not to upset Commander Vimes.’ He gave a little cough. ‘More than necessary.’

‘I’m sure we can pull together, sir.’

‘Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’

He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress.' (TT)

'We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.' (TT)

Lord Vetinari was not a man who delighted in the technical. There were two cultures, as far as he was concerned.

One was real, the other was occupied by people who liked machinery and ate pizza at unreasonable hours. (LH)

The wizards, once they understood the urgency of a problem and then had lunch, and argued about the pudding, could actually work quite fast. Their method of finding a solution, as far as the Patrician could see, was by way of creative hubbub. If the question was, ‘What is the best spell for turning a book of poetry into a frog?’, then the one thing they would not do was look in any book with a title like Major Amphibian Spells in a Literary Environment: A Comparison. That would, somehow, be cheating. They would argue about it instead, standing around a blackboard, seizing the chalk from one another and rubbing out bits of what the current chalk-holder was writing before he’d finished the other end of the sentence. Somehow, though, it all seemed to work. (LH)

Another response of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls. (LH)

The dungeons of the palace held a number of felons imprisoned ‘at his lordship’s pleasure’, and since Lord Vetinari was seldom very pleased they were generally in for the long haul. (LH)

'I have absolute confidence in Mr da Quirm’s work, and I’m sure he has too.’

‘Oh, dear. No, I never bother to have any confidence,’ said Leonard.

‘You don’t?’

‘No, things just work. You don’t have to wish,’ said Leonard. ‘And, of course, if we do fail, then things won’t be that bad, will they? If we fail to come back, there won’t be anywhere left to fail to come back to in any case, will there? So it will all cancel out.’ He gave his happy little smile. ‘Logic is a great comfort in times like this, I always find.' (LH)

'The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.' (GP)

'You can’t do that!’ Greenyham protested weakly, but the fire had drained out of him. Mr Stowley had collapsed on the floor, with his head in his hands.

‘Can I not?’ said Vetinari. ‘I am a tyrant. It’s what we do.' (GP)

‘... spies?' I thought we were chums with the Low King!’

'Of course we are,’ said Vetinari. ‘And the more we know about each other, the friendlier we shall remain. We’d hardly bother to spy on our enemies. What would be the point?’ (Th)

'Taking a force there now could have far-reaching consequences, Vimes!’

‘Good! You told me to drag them into the light! As far as they’re concerned, I am far-reaching consequences!' (Th)

'What would you do if I asked you an outright question, Vimes?’

‘I’d tell you an outright lie, sir.' (Th)

'The city bleeds, Mr Lipwig, and you are the clot I need.' (MM)

'Cunning can do duty for thought up to a point, and then you die.' (MM)

'Numbers are easy to outwit. They can’t think back. The people who devise the crosswords, now they are indeed devious.' (MM)

'I can assure you that if I had, as your ill-assumed street patois has it, “dropped you in it” you would fully understand all meanings of “drop” and have an unenviable knowledge of “it"'. (MM)

Vetinari just used stick, or hit you over the head with the carrot. (MM)

What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far

less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden. (MM)

'... this may well have been a case where chilly logic should have been replaced by the common sense of, perhaps, the average chicken.' (MM)

'Even tyrants have to obey the law.’ He paused, looking thoughtful, and continued: ‘No, I tell a lie, tyrants do not have to obey the law, obviously, but they do have to observe the niceties.' (MM)

'…what the wise man cannot change he must channel.' (UA)

'Cunning: artful, sly, deceptive, shrewd, astute, cute, on the ball and, indeed, arch. A word for any praise and every prejudice. Cunning… is a cunning word.' (UA)

'… I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.' (UA)

'Why is there a certain cast of the military mind which leads sensible people to do again, with gusto, what didn't work before?' (UA)

'And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.' (UA)

'We play and are played and the best we can hope for is to do it with style.' (UA)

'Young lady drink levels all mankind. It is the ultimate democrat, if you like that sort of thing. A drunk beggar is as drunk as a lord, and so is a lord. And have you ever noticed that all drunks can understand one another, no matter how drunk they are and how different their native tongues?' (UA)

'No civil police force could hold out against an irate and resolute population. The trick is not to let them realize that.' (UA)

'It does look as if football is very much like diplomacy: short periods of fighting followed by long periods of negotiation.' (UA)

'As a wizard I must tell you that words have power'.

'As a politician I must tell you I already know'. (UA)

'The way to retain power I have always thought, is to ensure the absolute unthinkability of oneself not being there.' (UA)

'There should be no slaves, even slaves to instinct.' (UA)

'… what is a pie to a happy ending?' (UA)

Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way, Drumknott. It’s good for the hygiene of the brain.’ (Sn)

‘What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together.’ (Sn)

‘How went your holidays, apart from lawless actions, ad hoc activities, fights, chases on both land and sea and indeed fresh water, unauthorized expenditure and, of course, farting in the halls of the mighty?’ (Sn)

‘… the law cannot operate retrospectively. If it did none of us would be safe.’ (Sn)

‘I have to negotiate this problem, and, believe me, it’s going to take a lot of quid for the pro quo.’ (Sn)

‘All of us hope for a little redemption, whether we deserve it or not.’ (Sn)

‘Do not seek perfection. None exists. All we can do is strive.’ (Sn)

‘… some music can follow you for ever.’ (Sn)

... he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. (RS)

'I find it amazing and, of course, annoying but so far he has always succeeded, which is why, therefore, all of his extremities are in their rightful place.' (RS)

'If you take enough precautions, you never need to take precautions.' (RS)

'Why, Mister Lipwig? You of all people ask me why? The man who danced on the train roof, the man who actually looks for trouble if it appears to be the kind of trouble which is associated with the term derring-do? Though in your case a few more derring-dont's might be a good idea. Sometimes, Mister Lipwig, the young you that you lost many years ago comes back and taps you on the shoulder and says, "This is the moment when civilization does not matter, when rules no longer hold sway. You have given the world all you can give and now it's the time that is just for you, the chance to go for broke in the last hurrah. Hurrah!" (RS)

'The world is changing and it needs its shepherds and sometimes its butchers.' (RS)

The Patrician was not, on his own admission, a lover of technical things that spun and, indeed hummed. Nor of unidentifiable squiggles. He saw them as things with which you couldn't negotiate, or argue; you couldn't hang them either, or even creatively torture them. (JD)

... Lord Vetinari survives by his wits, and can achieve with irony what most people can’t achieve with steel. (PP)

Favourite Vetinari Quotes