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.
Nothing is more generally known than our duties which belong to Christianity; and yet, how amazing is it, nothing is less practiced?
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
I tend to identify with my roles to such an extent that I appear to be totally convinced about certain statements that, in real life, I would never believe in.
The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness.
Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.
Man is a part of the world, and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar mode of Being, a living atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world.
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