“The Prime Minister gazed hopelessly at the pair of them for a moment, then the words he had fought to suppress all evening burst from him at last.“But for heaven’s sake — you’re wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!”Scrimgeour turned slowly on the spot and exchanged an incredulous look with Fudge, who really did manage a smile this time as he said kindly, “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.”
“The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.”
“Now (obviously) a sentence’s truth—even when we hold the sentence’s meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. “Brown is Prime Minister” is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there are countless worlds in which “Brown is Prime Minister” is false: in those worlds, Brown did not succeed Tony Blair, or never went into politics, or never even existed. And in some other worlds, someone else is Prime Minister — David Cameron, P. F. Strawson, me, Madonna, or Daffy Duck. In still others, there is no such office as Prime Minister, or not even a Britain; and so on and so forth. So a given sentence or proposition varies its truth-value from world to world.”
“Allan didn't even know if the Prime Minister was Left or Right. He must certainly be one of them, because if there was one thing life had taugh Allan, it was that people insisted on being one or the other.”
“Amigo! Amigo!" (Calling out to the ITALLIAN Prime minister....)”
“There's always a but. It's a magical word. You can say anything you want, go on for as long as you want, and then all you have to do is add the magic word and instantly everything you said is erased, turned meaningless, just like that.”