Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village-the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
Interpretation
Humans often face dangers that are known but underestimated, suggesting that some threats evolve to become more subtle and insidious.
This quote by Terry Pratchett reflects the idea that while dangers are often acknowledged in theoretical terms, they can remain distant and thus less urgent until they manifest in a way that directly affects individuals. The 'modern wolves' symbolize threats that have adapted to survive amongst humans, implying that the potential for harm exists but may not be perceived as an immediate risk due to the way those threats have evolved. This serves as a reminder that we must remain vigilant and aware of the dangers that may lurk beyond our immediate environment.
In practice
In a discussion about personal safety in a community meeting.
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.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.
Spirit is never without matter, matter is never without spirit.
A state arises,as I conceive,out of the needs of mankind;no one is self-sufficing,but all of us have many wants
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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