He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the complexities of power dynamics and the nature of conflict.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett presents a thought experiment illustrating the idea of disparate power relations through the metaphor of a fox and an angry sheep. The sheep, capable of hiring wolves, represents an adversary with resources and protection, emphasizing how situations can be deceptive and layered, where the traditionally weaker party can possess significant power, complicating the perceived roles of predator and prey.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might quote this to illustrate the unexpected sources of power.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values. Values govern people's behavior but principles govern the consequences of those behaviors.
Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
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