Quotes from NIGHT WATCH by Terry Pratchett
Privilege, which just means âprivate law.â Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.
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âYeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people,â mumbled Sam.
âDo they?â said Vimes. âThen why doesnât anyone do anything about it?â
ââCos they torture people.â
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It wasnât that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didnât offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didnât 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, heâd taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.
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Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authorityâeveryone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldnât, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.
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One of the hardest lessons of young Samâs life had been finding out that the people in charge werenât in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.
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People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, 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 wasnât that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.Â
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didnât measure up.
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Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?
Coppers liked to say that people shouldnât take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldnât be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be?
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âYou took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor,â said Vimes. âAnd to protect the innocent. Thatâs all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. Youâre an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.â
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âYouâd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldnât you, Comrade Sergeant?â said Reg encouragingly.
âIâd like a hard-boiled egg,â said Vimes, shaking the match out.Â
There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended. âIn the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higherââÂ
âWell, yes, we could,â said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of paper in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. âButâŠwell, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and Iâm pretty sure that whatever happens we wonât have found Freedom, and there wonât be a whole lot of Justice, and Iâm damn sure we wonât have found Truth. But itâs just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.â