Sir Terry is all to easy to quote. This one always gets me thinking:
"There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate. Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense.
It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers—say, three per citizen. Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day.
Some citizens took the not-unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers.
The average copper, when he’s been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don’t much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won’t instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford.
The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that. Admittedly, most of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens.
That was Assault On A City Official, a very important and despicable crime, and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere. It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them.
Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang."
And that from a liberal Englishman. I was taken aback reading Monstrous Regiment. "Did this guy write a book full of trans characters 21-years ago?! (Honestly, it got a little silly at the end with all the characters ending up trans, and a couple gay I think.)
He's also easy to read. Too often I see a comment with this much text and lose interest instantly, but I didn't even notice that this comment doesn't even fit on my screen until I started typing this
lol also true! I think of mine more in the context of when I see things from the media. If they seem to be instilling fear (omg immigrants are coming, they’re scary), it’s because they don’t want you to think critically.
If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.
Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Really helps me feel better about the fact that I'm a 28 year old man who exclusively watches anime
Unfortunately, a lot of smart people still have this problem. I'd say I'm pretty damn well rounded and all that's taught me is how easy it is to find a subject that I don't know that's still very important. Meanwhile, you can hardly throw a rock without finding an engineer that thinks he should rule the world.
I've spent decades trying to learn a little about everything. And I do know quite a bit! Yet I'm always taken aback to find some dumb thing I'd never heard of or considered, some new angle.
At this point I think I might be well knowledgeable about the time I hit 200, maybe 250. Not gonna make it.
More it's just the way I've pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn't control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It's more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.
It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called "stoicism" that advocated that.
I love too many to have one favorite but I might translate something decent from french :
"Absence is to love, what wind is to fire. It extinguishes the smaller and kindle the bigger."
-- Roger de Bussy-Rabutin (or I think so)
"“That’s not fair, you know. If we knew when we were going to die, people would lead better lives.”
IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN’T LIVE AT ALL."
Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.
Quote is still relevant. GitLab wouldn’t be my first choice but open core is better than fully proprietary. The work on Ayulla is a bit more interesting at the moment for the Git space, but I would prefer something atop Darcs or Pijul to Git.
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Though there are questions as to its veracity, "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad". As an artist, this is the reason I'll never rush things and spend ample time on my art.
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it"
And at the end:
"No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and gifts for their funeral-pyres and ostentatious funerals. But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span." [As if a child had died]