"Fire was always the terror in those parts of the city where wood and thatch predominated. That was why everyone had been so dead set against any form of fire brigade, reasoning—with impeccable Ankh-Morpork logic—that any bunch of men who were paid to put out fires would naturally see to it that there was a plentiful supply of fires to be put out. (pp. 208-209)"

"The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what’s in the public interest is not what the public is interested in. (p. 188)"

"Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day. (p. 187)"

"“How we gonna do that?” “Intelligently,” said Mr. Pin. “I hate that —ing way.” (p. 159)"

"He’s going to have to learn the hard way. And the trouble with the hard way is, you only get one lesson. (p. 148)"

"The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret. (p. 139)"

"If stress were food, he’d succeeded in turning his life into porridge. (p. 132)"

"When people say “clearly” something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all. (p. 129)"

"“Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.” “Are you sure?” “There’s still some around, aren’t there?” (p. 128)"

"Of course, that was a lie, but since it was such an obvious lie, he considered that it didn’t count. It was like saying the sky was green. (p. 120)"

"He was appalled at the ease with which the truth so easily turned into something that was almost a lie, just by being positioned correctly. (p. 117)"

"And William was good with words. Truth was what he told. Honesty was sometimes not the same thing. (p. 117)"

"It was a proper policeman’s stare. It gave nothing away. It said: I can see you, now I’m waiting to see what you’re going to do that’s wrong. (p. 110)"

"He’s a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don’t often hear it. (p. 110)"

"His father was right about one thing, at least, when he’d said that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. And it was amazing how people wanted to believe them. (p. 106)"

"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you’ve got the hang of it already. (p. 79)"

"“Ah,” said Mr. Pin. “Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens.” He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where “traditional values” meant “hang someone.” He did not have a problem with this, broadly speaking, but it never hurt to understand your employer. (p. 68)"

"If his body was a temple, it was one of those strange ones where people did odd things to animals in the basement, and if he watched what he ate, it was only to see it wriggle. (p. 66)"

"Insofar as he’d formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners. (p. 62)"

"He’d found a hard truth less hard than an easy lie. (p. 45)"

"“From what I hear he mostly doesn’t do a —ing thing!” he complained. “Yeah,” said Mr. Pin smoothly. “One on the hardest things to do properly, in politics.” (p. 43)"

"These dull gray blocks looked threatening. He could understand why they worried people. Put us together in the right way, they seemed to say, and we can be anything you want. We could even be something you don’t want. We can spell anything. We can certainly spell trouble. The ban on movable type wasn’t exactly a law. But he knew the engravers didn’t like it, because they had the world operating just as they wanted it, thank you very much. And Lord Vetinari was said not to like it, because too many words only upset people. And the wizards and the priests didn’t like it because words were important. An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do to the pie? As for printing a book of spells, and then using the same type for a book of navigation—well, the voyage might go anywhere. (pp. 37-38)"

"I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat. (p. 33)"

"Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works. (p. 32)"

"“And these are your reasons, my lord?” “Do you think I have others?” said Lord Vetinari. “My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.” Hughnon reflected that “entirely transparent” meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all. (p. 31)"

"A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know. (p. 23)"

"Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favor of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window. (p. 23)"

"But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms. (p. 23)"

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer? And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. (p. 21)"

"“You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office—” “Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in cupboards and throw it out of the window at night.” (p. 21)"

"In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less constantly, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.†"

"They were small, brightly colored, and happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted. (p. 19)"

"He felt a bit sorry that he’d pointed out the mistake. Probably no one would have noticed in any case. Ankh-Morpork people considered that spelling was a sort of optional extra. They believed in it the same way they believed in punctuation; it didn’t matter where you put it, so long as it was there. (p. 15)"

"“Ah, Mr. Worde. Times is hard in the hot sausage trade,” said Dibbler. “Can’t make both ends meat, eh?” said William. (p. 8)"

"For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works. (p. 6)"

"The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise. (p. 5)"

"All he knew was that you couldn’t hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that’d make the world, in a small way, a better place. Like shooting someone. (pp. 359-360)"

"“Didn’t you worry about the future?” “No.” “Why the hell not?” “It hasn’t happened yet.” (p. 353)"

"There were a lot of things he could say. “Son of a bitch!” would have been a good one. Or he could say “Welcome to civilization!” He could have said “Laugh this one off!” He might have said “Fetch!” But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things, then he’d know that what he had just done was murder. (pp. 344-345)"

"I’m sorry, but we all have to learn that lesson. Integrity makes very poor armor. (p. 342)"

"Now this he understood. It wasn’t damn politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as “bad.” It was all too complicated and, where it was complicated, it meant that someone was trying to fool you. (pp. 340-341)"

"“No crime has been committed!” “I’m a policeman,” said Vimes. “I can always find a crime.” (p. 308)"

"Practically from the moment she’d been able to talk she’d been taught how to listen. (p. 298)"

"He smacked the club down again. He roared. There were no words there. It was a sound from before words. If there was any meaning in it at all, it was a lament that he couldn’t cause enough pain. (p. 276)"

"“The innocent have nothing to fear.” The news that they have nothing to fear is guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of innocents everywhere. (p. 243)"

"Better any king than chaos. (p. 228)"

"“We are at war with the trolls!” “Well, that’s what diplomacy is all about, isn’t it?” said Vimes. “A way to stop being at war? Anyway, I understand it’s been going on for five hundred years, so obviously no one is trying very hard.” (p. 221)"

"“Good grief! You don’t think—” “No, I don’t think, sir, I’m a civil servant. I advise other people, mmm, mmm. Then they think. (p. 209)"

"Yet another word for diplomat, Vimes mused, was “spy.” The only difference was that the host government knew who you were. The game was to outwit them, presumably. (p. 205)"

"I don’t fink this is one of dem accidents dat happens by accident. (p. 203)"