"For a moment, Vimes wondered, looking out through a gap in the furniture, if there wasn’t something in Fred’s idea about moving the barricades on and on, like a sort of sieve, street by street. You could let through the decent people, and push the bastards, the rich bullies, the wheelers and dealers in people’s fates, the leeches, the hangers-on, the brownnosers, and courtiers, and smarmy plump devils in expensive clothes, all those people who didn’t know or care about the machine but stole its grease, push them into a smaller and smaller compass and then leave them in there. Maybe you could toss some food in every couple of days, or maybe you could leave ’em to do what they’d always done, which was live off other people… (p. 335)"