pieds d'argile

... A billion tons of geography rolled slowly through the sky.
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.

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No more kings. Vimes had difficulty in articulating why this should be so, why the concept revolted in his very bones. After all, a good many of the patricians had been as bad as any king. But they were... sort of... bad on equal terms. What set Vimes's teeth on edge was the idea that kings were a different kind of human being. A higher lifeform. (...)
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.

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(...) "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.
What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that?
Cockbill street people would stand aside to let the meek through. For what kept them in Cockbill street, mentally and physically, was their vague comprehension that there were rules. And they went through life filled with a quiet, distracted dread that they weren't quite obeying them.
People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn't true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless. All the laws and rules were for those people stupid enough to think like Cockbill street people.

Feet of clay
Terry Pratchett

Donc c'est un livre sur la démocratie, l'égalité des droits, le complot politique, mais en fait surtout c'est une comédie.