"“Come on, Mr Spangler, you don’t want me to get into trouble, do you?” said the hangman, patting him on the shoulder. “Just a few words, and then we can all get on with our lives. Present company excepted, obviously.”"

"I commend my soul to any god that can find it."

"“Work, for wages. I realize the concept may be unfamiliar.” Only as a form of hell, Moist thought."

"“It was a joke!” Moist burst out. “Oh, I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized,” said Lord Vetinari, turning back to Moist. “Do tell me if you feel obliged to make another one, will you?”"

"You see, I believe in freedom, Mr. Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will, of course, protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based."

"Moist shrugged. “Oh, all right. Of course I accept as natural-born criminal, habitual liar, fraudster, and totally untrustworthy perverted genius.” “Capital! Welcome to government service!” said Lord Vetinari, extending his hand. “I pride myself on being able to pick the right man.”"

"Always move fast. You never know what’s catching you up."

"There is a saying, “you can’t fool an honest man,” which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim."

"Weapons raised the ante far too high. It was much better to rely on a gift for talking his way out of things, confusing the issue and, if that failed, some well-soled shoes and a cry of “Look, what’s that over there!”"

"The Ankh-Morpork Central Post Office had a gaunt frontage. It was a building designed for a purpose. It was, therefore, more or less, a big box to employ people in, with two wings at the rear, which enclosed the big stable yard. Some cheap pillars had been sliced in half and stuck on the outside, some niches had been carved for some miscellaneous stone nymphs, some stone urns had been ranged along the parapet, and thus Architecture had been created."

"So, Moist thought, as he put the pot back with extreme care, inside the post office normality clearly does not have a one-to-one relationship with the outside world. I might miss the cues."

"What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter."

"Moist knew something about golems. They used to be baked out of clay, thousands of years ago, and brought to life by some kind of scroll put inside their heads, and they never wore out and they worked, all the time. You saw them pushing brooms, or doing heavy work in timber yards and foundries. Most of them you never saw at all. They made the hidden wheels go round, down in the dark. And that was more or less the limit of his interest in them. They were, almost by definition, honest."

"But now the golems were freeing themselves. It was the quietest, most socially responsible revolution in history. They were property, and so they saved up and bought themselves."

"Mr. Groat took a measured spoonful of tincture of rhubarb and cayenne pepper, to keep the tubes open, and checked that he still had the dead mole round his neck, to ward off any sudden attack of doctors. Everyone knew doctors made you ill, it stood to reason. Nature’s remedies were the trick every time, not some hellish potion made of gods knew what."

"“Oh, Pump 19,” said the woman. “He said it was government service.” “We call him Mister Pump,” said Moist primly. “Really? And do you get a wonderful, warm, charitable feeling when you do?”"

"“A man can learn all of an opponent’s weaknesses on that board,” said Gilt. “Really?” said Vetinari, raising his eyebrows. “Should not he be trying to learn his own?”"

"Freedom may be mankind’s natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling."

"Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar."

"He could make money! He was part of the government, wasn’t he? Governments took money off people. That’s what they were for."

"“Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?”"

"Everything everyone did affected everyone, sooner or later."

"He pitched the voice right. It was the key to a thousand frauds. You had to sound right, sound like you knew what you were doing, sound like you were in charge. And, while he spoke in gibberish, it was authentic gibberish."

"“But this, sir, is all about pie.” “Like in food?” said Moist, drawing back from the sinister glow. “No, no, sir. Pie like in jommetry.” “Oh, you mean pi, the number you get when—” Moist paused. He was erratically good at math, which is to say he could calculate odds and currency very, very fast. There had been a geometry section in his book at school, but he’d never seen the point. He tried, anyway. “It’s all to do with…it’s the number you get when the radius of a circle…no, the length of the rim of the wheel is three and a bit times the…er…” “Something like that, sir, probably, something like that,” said Grote. “Three and a bit, that’s the ticket. Only Bloody Stupid Johnson said that was untidy, so he designed a wheel where the pie was exactly three. And that’s it, in there.” “But that’s impossible!” said Moist. “You can’t do that! Pi is like…built-in! You can’t change it. You’d have to change the universe!” “Yes, sir. They tell me that’s what happened,” said Groat calmly."

"Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That’s why it always went wrong."

"That’s why there were postmen, with real feet. That’s why the clacks was a string of expensive towers. Come to that, it was why farmers grew crops and fisherman trawled nets. Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh-baked loaf. You could make fish jump out of the sea already cooked. And then, somewhere, somehow, magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford."

"Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not “not doing magic” because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."

"In the machinery of the universe, the wheels of inevitability clicked into position…"

"His mouth said: “Would you like to have dinner tonight?” For just the skin of a second, Miss Dearheart was surprised, but not half as surprised as Moist. Then her natural cynicism reinflated. “I like to have dinner every night. With you? No. I have things to do. Thank you for asking.” “No problem,” said Moist, slightly relieved."

"He stopped. Miss Cripslock was scribbling like mad, and it’s always worrying to see a journalist take a sudden interest in what you’re saying, especially when you half suspect it was a load of pigeon guano. And it gets worse when they’re smiling."

"“All right, all right, I really didn’t want to go into this, but it’s against my religion!” said Moist, who’d had time to think. “We’re forbidden to have any image made of us. It removes part of the soul, you know.” “And you believe that?” said Sacharissa. “Really?” “Er, no. No. Of course not. Not as such. But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say ‘Yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind.’ It’s table d’hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it could get silly.”"

"“You have made quite a splash,” said Vetinari, smiling, “as the fish said to the man with the lead weight tied to his feet.”"

"That was an important rule of any game: always make it easy for people to give you money."

"But what he was intending wouldn’t be stealing. It might not even be breaking the law. Fooling a maître d’ was practically a public service."

"Presumably he was insane, by the usual human standards, but it was hard to tell; the phrase “differently normal” might do instead."

"When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s."

"There was a party of well-dressed people with Gilt, and as they progressed across the room the whole place began to revolve around the big man, gold being very dense and having a gravity all of its own."

"And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it also worked on non-vampires."

"The key point was never to tell the truth. Coppers never believed what people told them in any case, so there was no point in giving them extra work."

"After all, what could a master criminal buy? There was a shortage of seaside properties with real lava flows near a reliable source of piranhas."

"It couldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen. But, you never knew…this time it might. Moist recognized that hope. It was how he’d made his living. You knew that the man running the Find the Lady game was going to win, you knew that people in distress didn’t sell diamond rings for a fraction of their value, you knew that life generally handed you the sticky end of the stick, and you knew that the gods didn’t pick some everyday undeserving tit out of the population and hand them a fortune. Except that, this time, you might be wrong, right? It might just happen, yes? And this was known as the greatest of treasures, which is Hope. It was a good way of getting poorer really very quickly, and staying poor. It could be you. But it wouldn’t be."

"“He’s a great believer in natural medicine, you see. He doesn’t trust doctors.” “Really?” said Dr. Lawn. “He retains some vestige of sanity, then.”"

"Incidentally, it’s best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted."

"He didn’t say this aloud, because although an elderly man probably has a lot less future than a man of twenty, he is far more careful about it…"

"“You speak to the gods and the gods listen,” said Miss Dearheart, grinning. “They told you where the treasure was. Now, that’s what I call religion. Incidentally, how did you know the money was there?” “You don’t believe in any gods?” “No, of course not. Not while people like Reacher Gilt walk under the sky. All there is, is us.”"

"It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start."

"Meaningless, stupid words, from people without wisdom or intelligence or any skill beyond the ability to water the currency of expression. Oh, the Grand Trunk stood for everything, from life and liberty to Mom’s homemade Distressed Pudding. It stood for everything, except anything."

"“But he is a man of…ingenious resource.” That seemed to Moist to be a very careful way of saying “murderous bastard.”"

"Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show."