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  • "... A great, rolling sea of evil. Shallow in some parts, yes, but deeper... oh, so much deeper in others. But men like you build these little rafts out of rules and vaguely good intentions and you say 'This is the opposite. This will triumph in the end.' Fascinating."

    -Vetinari to Vimes

    Paraphrased from the top of my head haha sorry if I've mucked it up. God what a character Vimes is. I do believe he also quoted guilty of thinking something like "everyone is guilty of something if you could only find out what," so maybe not a paragon of privacy in every iteration but a fantastic character nonetheless. Certainly gotta be among the best cops in fiction, considering he also nearly won a sort of people's revolution haha.

    • Just because the picture lacks quite a few pixels, I'm gonna leave this here for better legibility.

      Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.

      And I checked and the quote you remembered was from "Night Watch", published in 2002.

      Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew that. That was how you maintained your authority.

      But luckily Vimes isn't a fascist deep down, so it's more referring to the general psyche and not actually implying everyone is officially criminal

      • Thanks for finding that stuff! Yeah I suppose that "everyone was guilty of something" line just didn't age well for me. You're right that Vimes is certainly no fascist, especially given the other events in Night Watch.

      • not actually implying everyone is officially criminal

        It's Ankh-Morpork, I think canonically only Carrot isn't a criminal in that town

        • Well I wouldn't so far as to argue that, but I should like to make a few additions.

          First, I think Vimes is talking about guilt in general, not necessarily of being guilty of a crime, per se.

          Secondly, I think Carrot is canonically the only actually law abiding citizen, yeah, but... that would still leave at least Vetinari, who makes the rules, no?

          I wanted a quote from Vetinari here but there's too many so here's a couple. First, description, not a quote.

          "He didn't administer a reign of terror, just the occasional light shower."

          And

          You see, 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 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 overthrown 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. The good people don't seem to have the knack.

          One more for the road

          If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged

      • Or, you know, click on the image, right click and say "Open in a new tab" (or just click on it again), then click on it a third time and it will open in a magnified form.

        Then you will be able to view it with as many pixels as you want.

77 comments