[gmw]

This is all what you have to do, you walk along the Streets at Night, shouting, It’s Twelve O’clock and All’s Well. I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street.

It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.

‘Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. [...]

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, (1989)